


Detail Man(Devil in the Details)

by Laguera25



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:51:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 66,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean knew there was something off about Sam these days.  He just didn't think it would be this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2008 for Innie_Darling, who requested that Sam's hair do evil things.

Dean had always prided himself on being a detail man. Not Sammy's details, the ones gleaned from dusty books crammed in the furthest recesses of the library or nipped from the _Jeopardy_ Daily Double on boring evenings when the hunts had either stalled or dried up altogether, leaving nothing but endless hours of channel surfing. Dean would have preferred puzzling out the illicit secrets of porno scramblevision, but sometimes not even a decent pair of knockers was worth enduring Sam's endless bouts of bitchface. Sammy needed his Alex Trebek like Dean needed Bambi Sue Eden and her double-Ds. And Sammy needed his details, of course, his scraps of Trivial Pursuit magic that would save them all when an unknown monster found its way out of the deep, dark forest to bare its lethal fangs in challenge. Dean couldn't blame him for that; how could he when he understood that need all too well? His magic was a little different, that was all. So Sam got his _Jeopardy,_ and Dean settled for skin mags plucked from the racks of a thousand truck-stop gas 'n' gos. 

Dean's details didn't come from books or from the mouths of smarmy TV game show hosts. Books were only as trustworthy as the people who'd written them, and in his experience, most people were full of shit. They didn't mean to be-at least not most of them. Most of them were decent people just scraping by, armed with nothing but starry eyes and a head full of homespun horseshit handed down from dear old Mom and Dad. They were full of shit because the bullshit kept them alive, insulated them from the horrors that lurked in the unlighted corners of the night. The bullshit kept them moving from one day to the next, from cradle to casket with a minimum of fuss. Bullshit made the world go around, and most folks were only too happy to do their part by passing it on to the next generation in neat little packages of paper and binder's glue.

As for the integrity of TV game show hosts, well, that spoke for itself, didn't it? He'd thought for years that old Alex Trebek was a golem, a mud man slapped together by Merv Griffin and shambling through the motions with the dull-eyed, mechanical efficiency of the undying. Muscles formed of mud and blood never wearied, after all. For his part, Bobby was convinced Bob Barker was an incubus, a horny old man leeching his eternal youth and vitality from the endless parade of pretty young things that volunteered to pimp his cheap showcases to wiry car salesmen from Butte and lonely, Twinkie-addicted housewives from Dubuque who dreamed of running away to Hawaii in a Mitsubishi Lancer and finding Fabio on the black-sand beaches.

Dean had been intrigued by the idea and had suggested a trip to L.A. to check out both Barker and the Nerd King, Trebek, but Bobby had been waist-deep in tracking a ghoul haven in Boston, and besides, he'd said between sips of beer, Hollywood was so full of freaks, dead, undead, and undetermined, that they'd be lucky to tell the normal crazies that inhabited Hollywood from the dangerous ones. Dad hadn't been any more enthusiastic; he'd just said that they had enough to worry about without wasting time on wild goose chases. Dean had known when he was beat, and he'd let the matter drop, but he'd never entirely surrendered the furtive, secret hope of finding himself in the Hollywood hills, killing zombies like Chuck Norris and charming the ladies with his James Dean swagger. David Lee Roth wasn't exaggerating about those California girls, and if Sammy was allowed to dream of being Perry Mason, then he was allowed to pretend he was Hugh Hefner. Only with fewer wrinkles and without the need for a handful of little blue pills.

Dean's details came from the real world, from the cold, hard truth of what he could see and hear and touch and taste. They came from the curve of a woman's lips as she smiled at him from across a smoky, pool-hall bar, and from the way a man said his name for the very first time. They came from the heft of an iron bar in his hands as he raised it to stave in the phantom skull of a woman in white, and from the grit of bone dust between those same fingers as he wrenched her bones from the damp, rotten earth in which she'd lain and doused them with lighter fluid. They came from the taste of beer on his tongue, bitter apples and warm piss in a finger-smudged stein, and from the smell of blood, hot and coppery, pennies and iron in his nose.

Being a detail man had saved his life more than a few times and kept him out of trouble ten times more than that. It had probably saved him from a paternity suit, and when he was eighteen, it had saved him from a case of the crabs when he'd seen a blood-bloated nit crawling languidly across his conquest's mons. Dean trusted his eyes, ears nose, and mouth to fill in the gaps left by his instincts, and he'd never once had to grope between the seats of the Impala in search of a detail that had slipped through the cracks to wedge itself against the gearbox. His details never got dog-eared or tattered or yellow with age and moldy with neglect, and they never needed to be returned to the steel belly of the nighttime book drop every three weeks under penalty of fines. They never wilted in the face of technological advances or scientific breakthroughs. They were as dependable as he was, and he could reach for them with his hands full of gun barrel and rock salt.

It was his attention to detail that had drawn him back to Sam in time to drag him from his burning bedroom and spirit him away from prying eyes and the smoldering wreckage of his great American dream. If he hadn't noticed that his watch had stopped, fingerless hands raised in _(warning)_ surrender, he would've driven on, would've let the yawning gulf of years stretch between them while the blacktop collapsed behind him like an endless burning bridge. And Sam, stubborn in his love as he was in his belief in something better than John Winchester's narrow way, would've died with Jess, would've stretched out his hands in unconscious imitation of Dean's watch and died with his fingers turned to ash in her ribcage, a lover to the last.

His attention to detail hadn't saved Jess, of course, and he had no doubt that Sam would never forgive him that particular failure. It wasn't fair to blame him, any more than it was fair for Dean to think, _I told you so_ while Sam stared at hotel room ceilings in white-faced silence and relived her death on the rough, knobbled, nicotine-stained stucco. But grief wasn't interested in fairness, only retribution, and when you got right down to it, love wasn't interested in forgiveness so much as survival. So Dean had consoled himself with the luck of his details, and Sam had flogged himself with the sudden failure of his.

Not that Dean's details were foolproof. If they had been, he would've seen it coming when Sam pulled up stakes and bolted for Stanford, leaving nothing behind but the plaintive echo of his "Kiss my ass," on the kitchen air. He wouldn't have spent the rest of that night curled sullenly in the front seat of the Impala, his fingers around the cool neck of a bottle of Jim Beam, and the next year determined to be every bit the man his father was just to spite Sam, who thought John Winchester was anything but good enough. 

Hell, if they were foolproof, he would've realized that Ruby wasn't Ruby before he became puppy chow and wouldn't have ended up with the hand of God pressed to the flesh of his bicep like a brand.

Still, he trusted his attention to detail more often than not, and so, when a voice in the back of his mind began to whisper that something was amiss, he listened. A louder voice bellowed that of course something was amiss. How could it not be when he'd been raised from the dead by an agent of God schlepping through the world in the woebegone guise of a traveling salesman? The voice certainly had a point, but the other voice would not be denied, a wind chime sounding amid the furious tolling of bells. 

_Not right,_ it insisted. _Not right._

_Watch, Dean. Watch._

_Not right. Be careful._ A small, frightened boy whispering dire warnings from the shelter of the closet while the bogeyman from which he hid reached out to curl its inky fingers around his trembling ankles and yank him into the world behind the wardrobe before he could even scream.

Dean watched, and listened. And eventually, he saw.

It was in the small things, the details, if you wanted to get cute or annoying about it. Dean figured he'd earned the right to be a bit of a smartass after four months in the ground, and as for being an annoying pain in the ass, well, Sam had been calling him that for years, along with more people than he cared to count. It was so small that he dismissed it at first, chalked it up to a souvenir of his days in the Hellbound Hilton or to the uncharted territory of resurrection by divine emissary. Maybe his eyes had gone funny, been singed by the flickering flames of hellfire, or maybe God's handyman hadn't been top of his class in human reconstruction. Maybe it wasn't his eyes at all; maybe it was his mind that had gone soft, blighted by the poisonous waters of the River Leithe. Maybe he'd accidentally cupped the sweet and terrible waters in his raw, tortured hands and had drunk it with his ruined, parched lips in a bid to quench his unending thirst; he'd drunk of those terrible waters in a moment of feverish desperation, perhaps, and now they'd begun their gentle work of undoing him, of smoothing him to nothingness with the cool efficiency of water lapping at the edges of the seashore. Maybe he was forgetting now, and these little things were the beginning of his end. 

God knew there was so much he couldn't remember from his time down under, huge chunks of merciful blackness in which only hints of shadows danced. He supposed he should be grateful given what he _could_ remember. Sometimes, he'd be standing in front of the bathroom mirror or taking a leak in a filthy diner restroom and he'd hear himself scream even though his lips weren't moving. He'd stare at the cracked industrial tile above the urinal or below his haggard reflection while the piss dried to a painful trickle or the water splashed and splutted into the sink in a weak, incontinent stream, and he'd catch a glimpse of his face in the cracked, grimy tile or in the cloudy mirror glass. Not as it was, pale and perpetually bruised from too little sleep, but as it had been and still should be, bloody and battered and gouged by serrated claws and knouted lashes braided with sulphur and horsehair. He'd see that swollen, torn face with its bloody, bulging eyes and know that he was remembering. But those weren't memories he ever wanted to call home, and so he would beat them back by biting his knuckles until they bled or pinching the head of his limp prick until the pain bloomed in his balls and belly and brought the kinder darkness with it.

So when he awakened one morning to find that his jeans had migrated across the room and his wallet was perched delicately atop the dusty and beleaguered alarm clock, he blinked and ran his fingers through his hair and studied his wallet, which sat neatly atop the cracked casing. He looked at his jeans, which were folded on the ragged seat of the hotel room chair.

His jeans hadn't been on the chair the night before; he knew that because they were never farther away than the side of the bed in case necessity demanded a hasty exit. And his wallet most certainly hadn't been atop the alarm clock. It wouldn't do for the wallet to be anywhere but the side pocket of his jeans. There were too many identities tucked into its leather folds, too many names with his face. The manufactured lives in his wallet were enough to arouse the suspicions of even the densest college coed or most jaded hooker and bring the Feds to his door. The wallet stayed inside the jeans, and the jeans stayed beside the bed. The end.

Yet there they were in defiance of tradition.

His first instinct was to shrug and dismiss it as an aberration, more proof that his sojourn in the world's worst vacation Bible school had thrown him off his game. After enduring the worst punishment no human mind could ever fathom, maybe the threat of jail held no more terrors for him. Maybe this departure from the tried and true Winchester norm was his subconscious' way of saying it no longer gave a shit and would like to resign from this whole sorry affair, please and no goddamned thank you.

But the wide-eyed boy in the closet was whispering again, pale fingers curled around the doorframe in a white-knuckled grip, the thin crescents of his nails whiter than the paint that flaked beneath them.

 _Watch, Dean! Watch._ And the darkness pooled around his ankles like oil.

He stared at the jeans, so neat and tidy on the chair, as though a maid had crept into the room to fold them as he slept. He briefly entertained the notion that housekeeping had done just that, but quickly dismissed it. Sam's jeans were still puddled beside his bed, and yellow burger wrappers still littered the rickety table and nightstand, as did the thin pages of three separate newspapers. Only his jeans were folded, and the longer he looked at them, the uneasier he became.

They were too perfect, too pat in their arrangement. It wasn't the casual fold of a confirmed bachelor or the novice, haphazard fold of a college girl taking her first stab at domesticity. It wasn't even the efficient fold of a Marine. It was the delicate, practiced fold of-

_A mother's fold. Oh, dear God, a mother's fold. It's how Mom used to fold my clothes when she was putting away the laundry. She folded my pants and put them into drawers instead of hanging them up like Dad's because she was trying to save space._

That wasn't a train of thought he wanted to follow. The cherished, blurry images of Mary Winchester as a mother in her thirties, folding his pants and changing Sam's dirty diapers while he tugged gleefully on his toes had been supplanted by the exquisitely clear images of her as Mary Campbell, hunter and dream chaser, who'd sold her soul and her youngest son for ten years with John Winchester. Mary Winchester he remembered only in flashes, slivers of captured time that cut his heart and left loneliness and longing in the wounds. Mary Campbell he remembered in her agonizing entirety, an unrealized possibility dangling from the ends of an angel's fingers. Mary Winchester had left nothing behind but ash and regret; Mary Campbell had left the memory of her promise not to get out of bed on November 2, 1983, no matter what she heard, and of a kiss pressed freely to her dead father's lips while John cooled in her lap.

Mary Winchester had been perfect, an idol enshrined in the inviolate temple of his heart. Mary Campbell had been a liar. Mary Campbell had promised him she wouldn't get out of bed that November morning, but when the time had come, Mary Campbell had put on the skin of Mary Winchester and led her to her end on the ceiling of Sam's nursery. Mary Campbell had vowed that her sons would never taste of the hunter's gall, but Mary Winchester had ensured they would taste nothing else.

Then again, Mary Winchester had been a liar in her own right, though her lies had been white. Mary Winchester had leaned over his bed and told him that angels would watch over him. She had sealed that promise with a kiss, and then she had burned to death in hellfire with nothing but his father's name on her lips. What she had not told him was that an angel's vigilance was no guarantee of comfort and carried a price as high as a devil's bargain.

Liar, liar, mother on fire.

He looked at the creases in the fold and saw Mary Campbell gazing at him with a mixture of determination and pity. _I'll never let my children grow up to be hunters._

He closed his eyes and swallowed the lump in his throat. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself staring at Sam's jeans, wadded in a careless jumble beside his bed.

_If Mom was here, why didn't she fold Sam's pants, too?_

_Because Mary Campbell exists only for you, a little gift from Castiel,_ answered a voice that bore a suspicious resemblance to the angel in question, and Dean wondered if the smug bastard wasn't hitching a ride on his shoulder despite his protestations of terminal disinterest.

"Thanks a heap," he muttered, and scratched his nape.

 _Not Mary,_ whispered the boy in the closet. He was hunkered in a knock-kneed crouch, eyes wide and deep-set inside his pinched face. _Mary found her atonement in the nursery in Lawrence, watched over the new children who slept beneath her stain like she should've watched over you. She was the first sacrifice, and the second, the first link in this accursed chain of family. She spent her immortal soul to save you and your brother thirty-three years after she bartered your futures for her present security. Mary has flown away home, and she'll never come back._

"If not my mother, then who?" he asked the empty room, and Sam, buried beneath his coarse hotel sheets, shifted in his sleep. "Who, huh? 'Cause I gotta tell you, I'm getting real tired of all this disembodied voice crap and all these 'mysterious forces beyond my control' If this is another of God's little helpers, I think I'll pass, because frankly, the first one hasn't been that damn impressive."

Sam's head emerged from beneath the mound of brown sheets, and the thought rose unbidden in Dean's mind: _I wonder if that's what it looked like when I clawed my way out of my grave._ He tittered and fought a sudden rush of vertigo as his fingertips prickled with the memory of cool, dry dirt. 

The dirt had been everywhere, had coated him in a fine, brown mist, and it had sloughed from him as he'd stumbled towards the gas station and civilization. More had fallen with every movement, and he'd thought, as he'd staggered and lurched on legs that had been suddenly alien, that he was dissolving again, that his resurrection was only temporary, a cosmic mistake that the gods had recognized at the last moment. He'd held his breath to still the dirt, to stop its fall and hold himself together, but it had kept falling, and he'd been sure that he was going to disappear and be scattered by the wind, nothing but dust and insufficient willpower. He'd trailed dirt into the gas station, and he was sure that it'd flown in his wake on the drive to Bobby's salvage yard, borne by the wind. Even the wind couldn't scour him clean. He'd found dirt for a week afterwards, beneath his nails and behind his ears and even in the crack of his ass. His clothes, too, the creases and the pockets and the cuffs of his jeans. He'd been Dean the little dust boy, and Bobby had bitched incessantly about the constant smears and blots of dust that he'd left on his furniture. Dean had been too bedazzled by his return to the Winchester Family Circus and Traveling Freakshow to point out that Che Singer had been furnished in Early Dust since he was a kid.

Sam was watching him now, brow furrowed in confusion beneath his mop of tousled brown hair. He was sitting up, and the _(dirt)_ blanket pooled on his lap to expose his bare chest and arms. There were bruises and scratches on his chest and forearms and an odd, blue-black weal on the side of his neck. It took a moment for Dean to realize that the latter was a hickey. He wondered where it had come from, since Sam had gone to bed alone.

"Dean?" Sam leaned forward, a hank of sheets bunched in one hand as he prepared to throw them off.

 _Not Mary,_ the boy in the closet repeated. _She's not dark enough. Watch, Dean! Watch._

_Watch what?_

The boy said nothing, but his bleak gaze shifted. He was no longer staring at Dean or stealing fretful glances over his bony shoulder in search of the boogeyman, who, unbeknownst to him, coiled ever more possessively around his bony, brittle ankles. He was gazing at Sam with eyes like muddy river water. 

_Watch, Dean. Watch._

_Oh, Sammy,_ he thought. _When you throw those blankets off, will I find dirt on your legs?_

"Dean? Dean!" Sam tossed off the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the bed, and Dean knew that if he didn't respond, Sam would be peering into his eyes and snapping his fingers in front of his face like a jive soul doctor dispensing stumpwater hoodoo remedies to a Motown beat. 

"Sorry, Sammy," he said absently as he pretended not to be examining Sam's long legs. They were hairy and pasty, but they were also perfectly clean. Then, more brightly, "I was just admiring your new beauty mark there." He pointed at the hickey nestled in the crook of Sam's neck like a stolen kiss.

Sam froze in the act of scratching his bare midriff, and his cheeks reddened. "Oh." He stretched and turned his head, mouth open in a yawn. When it closed again, he said, "It's probably a bruise."

Dean snorted. "Bruise, my ass. I know a hickey when I see one. I've been giving and receiving them since you were still polishing your wood to the Pam Anderson centerfold."

Sam scowled. "I never liked Pam Anderson."

"Of course you did, Sammy. You're a man."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Dean, please. She looks like a blowup doll."

"You saying you've never been tempted to take one of those for a spin?"

"Whatever."

"I rest my case," Dean crowed jubilantly. "So who was she?"

"Who was who?" Sam rose from the bed and scratched the seat of his boxers.

"The hellcat you bagged last night."

Sam snorted. "One hickey, if that's what it is, which it's not, is a hellcat now?"

"Well, there're those scratches, too. You should tell her to bag the press-ons next time."

Sam blinked and dropped his sleep-gummy gaze to his bicep, which he prodded with the tip of his index finger. He inspected the red weals, lips pursed in concentration. "Huh."

"Huh?" Dean repeated. "Dude, if you're not impressed, then give me her number. I'll be glad to take her off your hands."

Sam sighed. "Dean, there was no girl, okay? No girl, no hickey, and no press-on nails."

"Right. So how'd you get those scratches?"

Sam shrugged, a brusque, inelegant bunching of his shoulders. "I probably got them on our last hunt."

"Our last hunt was ten days ago. You telling me that Mr. Resistant to a Demonic Zombie Curse can't heal a few scratches and a hickey in ten days?"

"Dean, they're just scratches, for fuck's sake. What the hell's gotten into you?"

Sam stopped abruptly. "Sorry, Dean."

Dean blinked, confused, and then he understood. "Relax, Sammy, Hell's not like Bloody Mary. It won't come if you say its name three times."

 _It doesn't have to come,_ countered a bitterly pragmatic voice inside his head that reminded him of his father. _You brought it with you when you crawled out of the dirt and dragged yourself into the light. Maybe it came with the dirt that you carried with you all the way to Bobby's salvage yard, and now it's scattered to the four corners of Singer's house like gris gris dust, infested with imp shit and sloughed demon skin and the tattered remnants of a scream. It's certainly in your head, dusted over your collection of precious memories. Sam's first steps share headspace with your first glimpse of the bottomless abyss and the millions of eyeless, tongueless faces that sought blindly for even the blackest light. Your first kiss now lies forever entwined with the memory of all those souls with their arms outstretched, tongueless mouths open to catch your blood as it fell in a bid to quench their inexhaustible thirst._

_Like it or not, son, Hell no longer awaits; it follows you wherever you go, an endless, blacktop carnival of hellbound souls, running to beat the Devil with his mark still cooling on their skin and simmering in their tainted blood._

_Watch, Dean. Watch._

"Did you fold my pants last night?" Dean asked suddenly. His heart was thudding painfully inside his chest, a cold, sharp-knuckled fist, and he fought the urge to sink into his nest of stiff pillows and hide.

"Your pants? You're grilling me about an imaginary girl because your pants are folded?"

"And somehow ended up across the room, yeah," he added defensively. "I know better than to leave my pants across the room, Sam. When I went to bed, they were just like yours." He pointed to Sam's pants, which were still in a sad, disheveled lump beside his bed. "And I damn sure wouldn't leave my wallet on the night table." He jabbed an accusatory, triumphant finger at his wallet as though it were the piece de resistance atop an incontrovertible mountain of damning evidence.

Sam studied the wallet for a moment, and then turned his gaze to the neat, blue square of denim on the hotel chair. He cocked his head, and for a moment, Dean thought that Sam felt it, too, that inexplicable frisson of wrongness that had crawled into his belly and dried the spittle in his mouth, but then Sam shook his head in bewilderment.

"Let me get this straight, Dean. You think I had a girl in here and aren't telling you because your pants are folded and your wallet is on the nightstand?" Sam punctuated each clause with a quick, precise chop, as though he were bracketing them.

"Well..yeah." Put that way, it sounded ridiculous, a teenage girl seeing the specter of infidelity in every movement of her boyfriend's mouth and hearing it in every pleasantry exchanged between friends.

 _But it doesn't feel ridiculous,_ said the Castiel impersonator who had joined the cast of thousands inside his head. _You've never had time for those idiots who shriek at every shadow and gibber in terror at every shitty ghost story tossed around the campfire by eight-year-olds and stoned frat boys, two groups with similar stages of emotional development. In fact, you've always held them in contempt, dismissed them as weak morons so desperate to inject excitement into their boring, comfortable, suburban lives that they'd invent horror where none existed. You have even less patience for those who invite disaster by toying with powers and creatures they know nothing about and then bleat in blind, ineffectual panic, pleading for someone like you and your family to save them from themselves. You consider them wastes of space, and if it weren't for the unforeseeable butterfly effects that would ripple in their absence and reshape the world, you'd be tempted to let them pay the piper._

_You haven't spooked at the cheap, paper terrors of manufactured horror since you were five years old and hiding with your squalling baby brother on the backseat floorboards of the Impala, praying that the fire monster wouldn't gobble your father up, too. There was precious little time for the screaming memes when you were trying to protect Sam from every new monster your father found in his search for vengeance, and even if there had been time for a hearty yowl at the celluloid horrors that oozed from grainy, bleary television screens or percolated in the gutted recesses of your childhood mind, your father would never have permitted it. You learned toute suite not to scream about the bogeyman unless you meant it, and you had better know just which bogeyman it was, because if Daddy brought the wrong weapon, it might eat you both and eat Sammy as a chaser._

_You haven't been a child since you were a child, and you've never succumbed to the vapors like a knock-kneed virgin at a bondage orgy. You can tell yourself that Sam is right all you want, that you're jumping at shadows and the ghosts of Hell's darkest halls, but you know better. It's more than just a hickey and a pair of folded pants on a hotel room chair. The world has undergone a seismic shift since you've been gone, one you feel deep in the bones and in the roots of your teeth._

_The bitch of it is, you can't quite put your finger on what's changed. Everything looks the same, and yet.. It's off-kilter. Just a touch. Like looking through the side of a milk-stained glass. Things aren't quite where they should be. Oh, they're not off by much, just a touch, an inch to the right or a hair too high, but it's enough to make your stomach drop and your head swim. Your guts know a truth your eyes can't see, and it drives you crazy. Sometimes the sense of abnormal geometry is so strong that you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from screaming and have to cram your fisted hands into your pockets to keep from stuffing your knuckles into your mouth. You've been tempted to ask Bobby if he feels it, too, or Sam, but you don't. Bobby because you know he doesn't; Sam because you're afraid he wouldn't tell you even if he did._

_There's too much you don't understand in this world you should remember so well, the world to which you so desperately wanted to return. Sometimes at night, while Sam is sleeping or pretending to sleep, you lie awake and wonder if you ever left Hell. Maybe you're still there, bound by your own skin, bumbling through an illusion created by your remorseless taskmaster and destined for a fresh horror without name. Maybe Lilith's sitting on her throne and watching you play her terrible game, that obscene child's titter bubbling from her throat like boiling pitch. Maybe she put you here to watch Sam die, dissolved from the inside out by the corrupted blood that flows through his veins and reshaped in the image of Azazel's golden child, a dark god in the blood with yellow eyes and a messiah's angelic face. It's exactly the sadistic scenario that satanic little hellwhore would get off on, making you watch your greatest failure in living color and in real time from right in the goddamn middle of it._

_Sometimes, when you can convince yourself that this is real and not the virtual world of a demonic Goldilocks, you wonder if I haven't made a mistake and dropped you into a parallel universe, pulled you through the warped glass of a funhouse mirror and into a twisted landscape of familiar faces speaking in unfamiliar tongues. Bobby is Bobby except when he isn't. He's as gruff as ever, but he seems older than you've ever remembered him. Before you died, you thought he was eternal, immutable as the bedrock of the earth, but since you've come back, you can't help but notice the new lines in the corners of his eyes or the grey that's settled over his hair like dust. Your death stole his immortality. Now he's just a tired old man running out of time and answers, and that scares you as much as the fear of going back to Hell to burn from the inside out with your bottomless sorrows and ceaseless, useless, unremarked guilt._

_And Sam…_

Dean closed his eyes in a bid to silence the voice, but it was no use. Castiel Lite was determined to have his say, to open his unseen mouth and let the truths spill from his lips like Divine judgment, an angel on the mount freed from the exhausting burden of mercy. 

_Sam is the not rightest thing in this topsy turvy world. He looks like Sam and talks like Sam, and the voice he speaks with is the voice you've known all your life, the one with which he promised to save you no matter the cost. The one that once cried out for you in the impermanent wilderness of the latest rented bedroom you shared, caught in the grips of terrors he was too young to name. But the language he speaks isn't the same. It's a cold and terrible glossilalia that hollows your belly and makes it flutter with unease, the ceaselessly wringing hands of a war wife who waits for an unsmiling Charon to knock on her door and greet her fretful scrutiny with an outstretched hand and an unspoken demand for tribute. It's not Sam's language, the language of empathy and compassion and unwavering, resolute hope. It's the tongue of dust and bones and ashes spread over unhallowed ground and forgotten by God and man. The grammar and syntax are as unfamiliar as the silver desert of the moon, and the words carry alien inflections and meanings that cut and grind against your new flesh. Sometimes the otherness makes you want to clap your hands over your ears, as though your mortal fingers could filter out the terrible strangeness._

_You're the one who burned, but it's Sam who's been re-forged and tempered into something new, been made harder than he was. The idealist has been crushed by the grim-faced pragmatist, and there are nights when you look at him in the wavering, uneven light of passing headlights or the cold, dim lights of the latest motel room and wonder who he is. Some nights, when he's hunched over the laptop or poring over a police report he lifted from some hick precinct, he looks like your father, hollow-cheeked and pale and numb to everything but the hunt in front of him. The Sam you knew would've hated the comparison, would've chafed and bridled and insisted that you didn't know what the hell you were talking about, but this Sam might not mind the comparison. This Sam might take it as a compliment. He wouldn't smile, though. This Sam never smiles unless it's part of the disguise._

_The Sam you knew was a little glass boy with no secrets to keep. He wore his heart on his sleeve and his hope in his eyes, and he was all about sharing and caring, Dr. Phil with a full head of hair. After your father bartered his soul for your life, that Sam hounded you to bare you soul and expose your broken heart for his inspection. That Sam believed in magic words like "closure" and "faith", and told you that he believed in God and prayed to the angels at night. That Sam thought all dogs went to heaven and that evil people got what was coming to them. That Sam believed in goodness and mercy with the innocence of a child, and he was your blessed hope._

_But that Sam is long ago and far away. This Sam has more secrets than truths in his heart, and where his heart now lies, you can't say. It's far removed from his sleeve, and most of its strings have been singed by hellfire. More than a few are missing. This Sam doesn't give a shit about Dr. Phil and has no patience for sharing and caring or closure. This Sam's asked you about your voyage to Hell, but you can't shake the feeling he's asking for strategic reasons rather than personal ones. This Sam isn't interested in your terror and pain, but in the demons who wielded the lash and the tongs and who sank their diseased claws into your guts and bones and left their taint behind. It's reconnaissance that moves him now, not compassion._

_This Sam believes in angels now because he must, but he is no longer certain of their goodness. In fact, he rather doubts it. Worse yet, this Sam has stopped looking for goodness and mercy. He finds it a childish illusion, an impossibility born of naivete and a pathological need for comfort. Goodness and mercy exist only in heaven, and he's not sure if heaven is real or another wistful figment of the human imagination. This Sam hopes for nothing now save the chance to save another life by whatever means necessary, and God help you, you're afraid of just what that means._

_This Sam forsakes you in the night, leaves you to the mercy of your uneasy dreams and disappears into the shadows. You don't know who he walks with, but you know he doesn't walk alone, and you know it isn't with you. Sam has been your faithful shadow since the day he was born, and with the exception of his years at Stanford, you know every step he's every taken and the roads on which he took them. For the first time in his life, he's gone where you can't follow. You could've followed him down the yellow brick road to Stanford, but you were too loyal, and too hurt by his casual dismissal of every wound you'd ever suffered to keep his ungrateful ass safe and preserve his childhood innocence for a while longer, so you let him go; later, when the heat of the wound had cooled and dulled to a throbbing ache, you wished him well._

_But where this Sam goes, you can't follow, and you're not sure you would if you could. You would've followed your Sam to the ends of the earth and jumped blindly into the abyss to pull him out again, but this Sam goes where angels fear to tread, and when he comes back, there's sulphur on the soles of his shoes. He smells of brimstone and damnation and of everything you died to keep away from him. He smells bitter, innocence corrupted. You thought a smell like that would turn your stomach, but it breaks your heart instead._

_Your Sam was a Sam of new beginnings and life after this. This Sam speaks of nothing but the end. You would've died for your Sam, have died for him. Now you're afraid you'll die_ because _of him. Part of you wonders when you became such a coward, but most of you suspects it isn't you who's changed. Sometimes, you wonder if dead isn't better, after all._

But he couldn't say any of this to Sam, because right now, he looked like the Sam of old, tousled and fretful and peering at him with an expression of burgeoning concern from beneath untidy brown hair. He knew that if he didn't speak up, Sam was apt to decide he was losing his mind and drag him to Bobby's, where he and Singer would tiptoe around him and pore over moldering books on Hell while they kept him busy with such ball-busting tasks as mowing Bobby's weed-choked lawn and cleaning the same ten carburetors ten times.

Dean swallowed the sour unease on his tongue, cleared his throat, and rubbed his nape. "Yeah. Well. When you put it like that, it sounds really fucking stupid."

Sam snorted. "That's because it is, Dean." Put-upon and holier-than-thou, and Dean smothered the maddening desire to cuff him upside the head. "Now, can I take shower, or would you like to inspect if first to make sure I haven't hidden a stripper in there?"

"I thought library assistants were more your type, Sammy. I see you're broadening your horizons. If she says her name is Kandi, tell her I had nothing to do with that rash in '04."

Sam rolled his eyes and padded into the bathroom, and Dean watched him go with his lips pulled into a fragile, too-tight grin. He could feel his cheekbones pressed against the frozen flesh of his cheeks, sharp, fleshless fingers inside his mouth. _Too thin, too thin,_ his mind yammered frantically. _Any further and the skin would tear and slough like bits of charred paper._

He was still grinning stupidly when Sam shut the bathroom door. Pain blossomed and prickled in the palms of his hands, and when he looked down, he was surprised to find his fingers curled into bloodless, white-knuckled fists. He willed his them to relax, and they unfurled to reveal nails stippled with blood. His palms burned and tingled with the promise of blood, and the imprint of his fingernails reminded him of teeth, as though an unseen creature had crept up while he'd argued and stolen a piece of him when he wasn't looking. Not a big piece, mind. Just a nibble. Even monsters had small, dainty mouths. The thought filled him with helpless revulsion, and he closed his hands again to protect them from greedy, suckling mouths. An image arose in his mind of hands tipped with pearlescent claws that razed and harrowed unprotected flesh, but he banished it before it could coalesce.

"Get a fucking grip, soldier," he ordered himself, but his heart was triphammering inside his chest, and the command emerged as a strengthless, pitiful rasp. He opened and closed his hands in an effort to dispel their odd, dreamy weightlessness, and each flexion of his fingers plunged a miniscule darning needle into his wounded palms.

 _Do that long enough, and I can have my own goddamn stigmata. Wouldn't that be a trip? Me and my demonic brother on a cross-country road trip, Lucifer Junior and the Christ without a cause, rambling down the backroads with Led Zeppelin on the radio._ He laughed, a strangled bleat in the dusty, yellow silence of the room, and tucked his head to his chest, the better to avoid the sight of those damn neatly folded pants.

 _Are you sure it's Sam you brought back?_ Not the voice of Castiel or his father or the crouching boy in the closet at the edge of the abyss, but of Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon who'd taken his mother in sacrifice and sown the demon seed in Sam. He saw him in all his Kansas farmer cornpone splendor, leering at him with that usurped mouth and blinking at him with his unnatural yellow eyes. _Are you sure it's Sam in there washing his pits with the sorry sliver of hotel soap? Are you really, honest-to-God sure, there, Dean?_

 _Stop him, or we will._ Castiel, issuing Divine law with his borrowed human mouth and gazing at him with a mixture of pity and terrible knowledge. Castiel, who in his heart was as hard and pitiless as any demon. Sam had always believed that angels were creatures of light and tenderness whose veins boasted the purest milk of compassion, but like so many of Sam's dreams, that notion had proven to be so much blind hope. Angels were stone and adamant behind the light of undimmed glory, assholes with the right credentials. 

"Shut up, you lying son of a bitch," he snarled at Azazel. "Go back to roasting in Hell where you belong. I brought back Sam, and nobody else."

Azazel smiled. His yellow eyes were cold above his jovial, aw-shucks grin. _If you're so sure of that, then why are you so afraid of a misplaced wallet and a folded pair of jeans?_

"You're full of shit." He got out of bed and snatched the wallet from the night table, the cheap vinyl billfold clutched in his hand like a stone. He stalked to the chair beside the rickety table and yanked the jeans from the seat. The worn denim was warm in his sweaty hand, like human skin, and he bared his teeth in a reflexive moue of disgust. He swallowed with a dry click as the legs unfolded and shoved the wallet into a rear pocket, where it bulged like a tumor.

"Full of shit," he repeated dully, and held the jeans at arm's length between his thumb and forefinger.

Azazel's grin became a derisive smirk. _That's mighty brave, Winchester,_ he said, and applauded slowly. _John wasn't laying it on thick when he said his boys were fine warriors. Good boys, was how he put it, as I recall. When he wasn't crying and begging for mercy and a single drop of water, that is. I'm impressed. I thought it was all Winchester bravado. You and yours have a history of being spectacularly full of shit._

"I'll take that as a compliment," he muttered. The jeans dangled and swayed slowly from his fingertips, as though unseen legs kicked and pedaled on the air. 

_So how about putting them on?_ The smirk broadened to a vulpine leer.

"How about you go fuck yourself?" He dropped the pants. "Fuck you running, asshole." The pants lay at his feet in a crumpled heap, and the waistband yawned at him like a toothless, forlorn mouth. Just a pair of Wranglers that he'd picked up at a Goodwill and worn a thousand times. He'd worn them yesterday without a thought, and now the thought of wearing them inspired a swooning, nauseated dread.

 _Big, bad Dean Winchester, afraid of a pair of jeans,_ scoffed Azazel, and Dean imagined his yellow eyes gleaming with sadistic amusement.

His irrational fear infuriated him, and he kicked the defenseless pants, which clung to his socked foot in search of mercy. Another kick, and the waistband mouth retched. A pant leg curled around his ankle in mute supplication, and he shook it off with a revolted hiss.

"Son of a bitch."

He kicked until the screaming waistband mouth went slack, and then he stood over the lifeless pants, panting. He felt idiotic and half-mad, a hare run to ground by the long, thin shadows of the wolf, but he also felt a perverse sense of relief, as though he had crushed smoldering embers before they could ignite and swallow him with tongues of dancing flame. He reached down and pulled the wallet from the back pocket, and then he kicked the jeans under the nearest bed, a murderer erasing evidence of his dark misdeed. He was tempted to leave the wallet, too, but there had been precious slim pickings at the local juke joints, and they needed the money the assorted credit cards and fake identities could provide. He tossed the wallet onto his bed and rubbed his palm on his outer thigh, wincing at the sudden recollection of his self-imposed stigmata.

 _Watch, Dean. Watch._ The boy in the closet stared at him with his pinched, chalky face, oblivious to the darkness that pooled around his ankles and slithered languidly across his thighs in an avid lover's caress, possessive and oddly intimate.

 _I'm not the one who needs watching, kid,_ he thought, but said, "Watch what?"

The boy sank even further into his crouch, and his pale, narrow hands dangled bonelessly between his thighs. His fingertips grazed the flesh there, as though to brush aside the relentlessly encroaching darkness, but the serpentine tendrils simply slipped over his lax fingers and tattooed his waxy skin with an ever-shifting latticework of whorls and lines. He said nothing, but turned his baleful gaze to the closed bathroom door.

"Sam? Is it Sam?" he demanded. "What about Sam? You better start talking, you little freak, or I'm going to wring your neck." He thought for a moment. "Course, that's not a real effective plan if you're already dead."

Just then, Sam emerged from the bathroom on a cloud of steam, wrapped in a dingy, threadbare towel the color of dust and rotten lace. It reminded Dean of a winding sheet, and his mouth went dry.

_Am I supposed to watch out for Sam? Is something going to happen to him? I've already sold my soul for him. Don't think for one second that I won't do it again._

"Dean?" Sam surveyed him through the rapidly dissipating steam, hands on his hips. "Who are you talking to?" His gaze was sharp, searching, and Dean fought the urge to flinch. It was too bright, too damn knowing.

The boy in the closet shook his head and pressed a bony finger to bruised lips. _Ssshh. Watch, Dean. Watch._

He was tempted to tell Sam anyway, to blurt it out for spite. He was tired of being led around by the nose by aloof angels with their own agendas and used by demons as a bleeding, screaming party favor, but the image of his jeans folded with a maternal crease loomed large in his mind and settled in his chest with the cold weight of portent, so he shook his head and said, "Nothing, Sammy."

Sam was clearly unconvinced. He narrowed his eyes. "Dean-,"

Dean held up his hands to forestall a barrage of armchair psychology. "Sam. Can't a guy just greet the day?"

"That's the second time you've talked to yourself," Sam pointed out shrewdly, and not for the first time, Dean cursed his tenacity and Ivy League smarts.

"I'm talkative."

"That'd be a first since you've-," Sam paused, and Dean could see him flipping through his mental thesaurus for the appropriate term. "-been back," he finished lamely.

 _Sorry, Sammy,_ Dean thought with bleak amusement. _I don't think there's an Ann Landers column for this._

"Burning in Hell leaves you at a loss for words, Sam," he snapped. "It's kinda hard to talk when your vocal cords are popping like gristle in your throat from all the screaming. Not to mention all the smoke and fire. Hell, I'd think you'd be grateful that I was talking at all, given your obsessive hard-on for me to stop being so damn quiet."

Sam swallowed. Dean, I didn't mean-," His eyes were wide, guilt-stricken and pleading.

"I'm gonna load up the car," Dean said brusquely. "Why don't you finish primping and get us checked out?"

Sam took a deep breath and blew it out again. He ran his fingers through his still-wet hair, which had been temporarily tamed by the steady pulse of the water. It clung tightly to his scalp in a glossy skullcap, and Dean was suddenly struck by how young he looked. Sam was twelve again, all long arms and legs and gangly elbows and hairless chest. When Sam answered, Dean was shocked by how adult he sounded, how old.

"Yeah, all right," Sam said quietly, and his shoulders slumped in defeat.

Guilt came then, hot and stinging as the broken crescents pressed into the flesh of his palms, and he opened his mouth to apologize, but then he closed it again. He wasn't sure what to apologize for, and besides, there was nothing he could offer that Sam would understand. So he simply strode to his bed, picked up the wallet and bent to retrieve his duffel bag. Sam toweled off and dressed in silence, and when he left for the decrepit, flyblown lobby with a tarnished key in his hand, the boy in Dean's head nodded in solemn approval.

 _Watch, Dean. Watch._

Dean unzipped his duffel, snatched his shirt and flannel from the scrawny, wooden bedpost, and said nothing. Despite what he'd told Sam, he was all talked out. Even the smallest words were heavier than he could lift, and in a terrible paradox, they meant less than ever. They were so much air forced between his teeth, and the more he spoke, the more he felt like he was suffocating. It was easier to keep his mouth shut and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. 

The car was packed by the time Sam emerged from the manager's office with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans. Dean slid into the driver's seat and turned the ignition, and the Impala rumbled into deep-throated life around him. The car's steel frame was as warm and familiar as a cradle, and he sank into the seat and closed his eyes.

"No place like home," he muttered, and curled his fingers around the worn leather of the steering wheel. The car vibrated beneath his hands, brimming with bridled horsepower and eager to hit the open road, and he smiled. "Yeah, baby," he said, and patted her dash. "I hear that. Oh, yes, I do."

Sam, busy arranging his lanky frame in the passenger seat, snorted, but Dean saw some of the tension ebb from his shoulders. It might've been odd for him to be talking to the cheap motel room, but Sam had heard him talking to the Impala since he was five years old and playing fort in the backseat, warding off the monsters with fistfuls of Morton's table salt and a plastic cap gun their Aunt Judy had bought him at a grocery store. His conversations with this cherry _Popular Mechanics_ pinup girl were a part of the soundtrack to Sam's life, on par with Dad's insistence that they clean their guns before they clean their teeth.

 _Speaking of which,_ Dean thought, and snapped on the radio. It crackled and hissed into life, and through the bursts of static came Robert Plant's defiant call to Valhalla and rock and roll infamy in "Immigrant Song". His fingers drummed along to the beat, and his head bobbed in time to the music. He drew in a breath with which to sing along, and then he remembered his strange premonition in the hotel room, Lucifer Junior and the Christ without a cause, traveling down lightless backroads with Zeppelin on the radio. The indrawn breath withered in his chest, and he reached out and turned the radio tuner with a snap of his wrist. The white needle of the tuner speared the numbers of a new station like the tine of a pitchfork, and from the guts of the radio came the fire-and-brimstone voice of a Bible-belt preacher in the ecstasy of universal damnation. 

Dean snapped off the radio. "Too full of static," he offered feebly when Sam raised an eyebrow in mute inquiry. "If I want music, I've got the good stuff right here." He patted the shoebox of cassettes nestled neatly between the seats.

Sam said nothing, but continued to survey him in contemplative silence. Dean threw the Impala into reverse and backed out of the parking lot and onto the highway, a sun-blistered stretch of two-lane blacktop that stretched to nowhere and everywhere in either direction. The tires met the blacktop with the enthusiastic kiss of rubber on road, and then the motel was gone, receding to an insignificant blot in the rearview mirror.

"Where to, Sammy?" he asked with a voice that sounded too brittle and raw inside his mouth, too fraught with the effort of words that cut his mouth like shards of glass and filled it with the taste of blood and poison.

Sam's mouth twitched. For him, the words still flowed like milk and honey, and Dean knew he brimmed with questions and well-intended accusations, demands that Dean bare wounds that still pulsed and throbbed with lingering hurt. Finally, Sam opened the glove box and rummaged inside for the roadmap stuffed beside a Maglite and the Impala's registration. He unfolded it and smoothed it over his knees.

"I think there might be a headless horseman in New York," he said.

"Awesome. I've always wanted to see if old Ichabod was as squirrelly as Uncle Walt made him out to be in the movie."

He pushed the accelerator, and the car rocketed toward the horizon, the great-great-great grandson of the headless Hessian's bootblack steed. It was twenty miles before the image of his folded jeans left him, and another ten before he felt safe enough to turn on the radio and fiddle with the tuner. No Zeppelin then, just The Black Crowes telling the world that she talked to angels, and while the song made his skin prickle and crawl with a nameless unease, he left it on and prayed that whoever found his jeans had the sense to burn them.


	2. Chapter 2

Two days later, he was still driving, and the radio was still his companion, counting off the hours and the miles in four and five-minute increments. The Black Crowes had faded into memory and reappeared, singing of jealousy with bluesy Georgia gusto. They had given way to Styx and Kansas and Cream. He'd even heard songs from Bread and Strawberry Alarm Clock, though he'd had to wonder whose crypt the deejay had plundered to resurrect that particular golden oldie. He hadn't seen a copy of Strawberry's music since Dad's vinyl collection had bubbled into so much tar and acetate the night of the fire. He hadn't been sure if he'd wanted to shake the man's hand for unearthing such a blast from the past or beat the living shit out of him for unleashing such crap on the world. 

But Strawberry Alarm Clock and their Nosferatu awfulness had fallen by the wayside hours ago, died in the glare of a sun that had set and charred the sky in its wake. Now it was AC/DC who ruled the airwaves, and Bonn Scott crowed about being someone's back door man, his liquor-roughened voice a soothing contrast to the smooth, oily darkness outside the car. Dean was tempted to sing along, but Sam was asleep, curled into a loose ball of dreams in the passenger seat, and Dean didn't want to wake him. Sam's eyes saw too much when they were open, always had, and Dean wanted to hide in the darkness for a while.

The car thrummed quietly, eating up the distance and the miles. The ride was so smooth that he wondered if the road hadn't become a river with the advent of the night, the hard asphalt gone to mirrorglass waters under the Chevy's wheels. The headlights were small, twin moons that illuminated the road in patches of watery, yellow light, and the reflectors placed at intervals on the highway resembled the eyes of alligators watching the world by swamp moonlight. He was a ferryman, navigating the river by the light of the waxing moon, and there were none to see him pass. On the radio, Bonn Scott offered paeans to the dark gods in the blood, and beside him, Sam, rocked to the rhythm of the unseen current, arms folded across his chest and head lolling bonelessly against the cool glass of the passenger window. His world was as calm and right as it would ever be.

They would be in Tarry Town, New York by dawn, and he hoped they'd have time to hit the thrift shops for a new pair of jeans and a few new flannel shirts. It was late October, almost Halloween, and the air had grown thinner and colder as the world had begun to die. He'd passed trees in the wan, milky daylight, and though many of them had still burned and crackled with autumnal fire, they'd been outnumbered by those shorn of their crown of leaves and left to shiver and stoop beneath the comfortless sunlight, bare, skeletal arms held forth to the indifferent heavens in supplication. If Sam asked why he needed a new pair of jeans, he'd tell him he'd forgotten his in his rush to hit the road. Sam might be suspicious, but he could probably be distracted with research into the Satanic Secretariat and the jockey from Hell. 

He'd need a pair of gloves, too. If he was going to be hunting a headless maniac on horseback, he'd need to keep his hands steady and his trigger finger flexible. He didn't fancy being raised from the dead only to be trampled into quivering jelly by the thundering, iron-shod hooves of a demonic horse. He liked to think he'd earned that much dignity at least.

He'd pick up a pair for Sam while he was at it. His brother's hands were decidedly chapped of late, especially the fingertips and knuckles. He'd first noticed it yesterday, when they'd cleaned their guns in a grimy hotel room in Arlington. The knuckles had been scraped and raw, as if Sam had incurred the ire of a ruler-ninja nun or gone three rounds with a woodpile. His fingertips had been a painful, mottled purple, frostbite or blood blisters or the necrotic aftereffects of a burn. Sam had insisted he'd slammed his fingers in the passenger door of the Impala, but he'd avoided his gaze when he'd said it, and when Dean had gone to check his girl for dints and dings courtesy of Sammy's Sasquatch fingers, she'd been unblemished. He hadn't mentioned this to Sam, any more than he'd mentioned the unexpected whiff of sulfur he'd caught coming off Sam's gun when he'd packed it into the trunk this morning. He'd just told himself it was cordite he smelled, and his mind had let it be even though his guts had known better. He'd get the jeans, and if Sam got nosy, Dean would brandish the gloves at him and broach the subject of Sam's abused hands. He was sure Sam would let it go after that, and if he didn't, well, Dean guessed he'd learn more than he ever wanted to about where Sam went and what he did when he left him behind with his demons in some seedy hotel room. 

He'd dreamed of the jeans last night, had gone to the netherworld behind his eyelids and seen the jeans as he'd left them, boneless, denim legs jutting from beneath the bed, an ill-buried secret. They'd been dingier and more threadbare than he'd remembered, and bleached by a moonlight that hadn't been there when he'd left them to their Sealy tomb. The empty cuffs of the pant legs had regarded him like sunken, toothless mouths, and he'd wanted to turn from the sight of them, filled with a puzzling shame that bowed his shoulders, but his gaze had remained fixed on the scene before him. In the silver-blue light of the moon, the jeans had been bleached bones.

There had been no sense of time in his weaveworld, only a dreamy expectation. The bleary, red numbers on the bedside alarm clock had read _00:00,_ and though his sense of anticipation had built to a climax just out of reach, the numbers had never changed. No _1_ or _2_ or _3_ to blink at him like the tines of the devil's pitchfork, just the unmoving and immutable hour of none.

He knew all about the hour of none; it was the only measure of time in Hell. It had no beginning and no end. It was infinite and forever. An end offered hope you see, a slim, golden thread dangled before a suffering soul by a merciful God, and there was no God in Hell save one whose name was never heard and whose face was never seen even by those who served him. The hour of none was when the pain began but never ended. An enterprising demon had once brought him an hourglass and told him that it counted down the hours and the minutes of Hell, and that when one side emptied into the other, an hour had passed, and so Dean had watched it fervently, willed the drops of blood to trickle down and bring him one drop closer to nothingness. But no matter how many drops had fallen, the bottom had never filled and the top had never emptied, and the demon had thrown back his head and laughed while Dean had screamed and thrashed in his bonds.

_We got nothing but time in Hell, Dean,_ the demon had croaked. _So make yourself comfortable, because you're going to be here a long, long time._ The demon had clapped its smoldering, reptilian hands, and the blood inside the hourglass had boiled and hissed, and then, it had evaporated. Dean had watched the top refill with fresh blood, and then he'd howled. The demon had observed his panic and despair in jaundiced ecstasy, and the hour of none had begun again.

So, yes, he knew about the hour of none and what it meant, and its presence in his dream had prompted a deep, clammy-handed foreboding. The hour of none was the end of all good things, and he'd tensed in preparation for the calamity it surely presaged. He'd waited for rotting, disembodied hands to push through the floor and nod wildly in the moonbone light, a hand of glory garden waiting to drag incautious feet down into the fathomless dark. He'd waited for the jeans to slither from beneath the bed like a living skin and slip beneath the crack in the door in pursuit of him. He'd waited for the clock to bleed, or maybe burn with an infernal green light and blare Led Zeppelin in a watery warble. He'd waited for the ceiling to burst into flames and send his mother raining down on him like heaven corrupted. He'd even waited for Lilith to be standing in the narrow closet, staring at him with her impassive face and opaque eyes.

But none of those things had happened. The floor, though sunken in places from warped and weather-softened wood, had remained steadfastly unblemished by grasping hands. The pants hadn't jitterbugged into queer, arachnid life and scuttled across the floor. They'd lain inert, the relic of a shapeshifter long gone to some other body, some other life. The numbers in the square clock face hadn't bled, and neither had its tinny, static-choked voice rasped into sudden life. No green light, no Led Zeppelin whining and grating through ancient speakers. The motel room closet had been empty, no Lilith in a blood-spattered Sunday dress, waving coyly and leering at him with a red, candy-sticky mouth. No Mary Winchester had rained down like fire from heaven, sizzling and smoking on the carpet, like bits of fallen sun.

But Mary Winchester _had_ come. His mother had opened the motel room door and drifted inside on feet that never seemed to touch the ground, though she moved as if they did. She'd left the door ajar and glided to the bed, where she'd stopped and stared at the pant legs protruding from the bed. There had been curiosity on her face, and a cold, wistful longing that had stirred long-dormant memories of her sitting in his nursery that would soon become Sam's nursery and stroking her swollen belly with fluttering, absent hands. She'd worn that same expression then, dread and tremulous ecstasy, as though she were gazing down a tunnel into a bright and awesome light.

Her expression had frightened him then, so much so that he'd crept into the room and approached her with his index finger lodged between his cheek and gum. When he was nervous, he'd liked to gnaw on the fingertip, massage it with the worrisome, relentless kneading of his gum and small milk teeth. The rhythm had soothed him. His father had chided him every time he'd seen it, but Mary had always let him be. Maybe she'd known it soothed him, or maybe she'd simply had worrystones of her own. She'd taken to rubbing her belly a lot that winter and early spring, and he'd known instinctively that her slow, circular strokes were a source of comfort. His father had thought she did it for Sammy, but that had been because his soldier father had placed no faith in either rituals or worrystones then.

The stroking hadn't worried him, but her long-distance eyes had, and he'd sidled into the room with his chest too light and his bladder too heavy. Before Sammy had come to sleep inside her belly, he would've climbed onto her lap and reassured himself with the steady, lulling beat of her heart, but Sammy had been a space hog even in utero, and her lap had disappeared, swallowed by the taut, white eclipse of her belly. So he'd reached out and touched the gold filaments of her hair, Mama's sunshine that warmed his hand and made him feel safe.

She'd started at his touch and uttered a breathless, rabbity cry, and he'd frozen, sure he'd done something terrible, like wake the baby inside her before he was finished sleeping. He'd withdrawn his hand and retreated a pace, gum pumping like a wet, pink treadle inside his mouth and stitching his hapless finger with an intricate pattern of wrinkles. 

For a moment, those looking-glass eyes had lingered blindly on him, and he'd been so afraid that he'd wanted to cry, but then her expression had cleared.

"Dean," she'd said, and stroked his cheek, and it had been warm and normal and just his mama, though her voice had sounded tired, as though the runners of the rocking chair had learned to project their squeaking protests into her throat.

"You okay, Mama?" he'd asked fretfully, speaking in a whisper so as not to wake the baby, who kicked and squirmed inside her when he was grumpy.

His mother had smiled at him, and for the rest of his life, he'd remembered that smile as she'd rested in her rocking chair with her hand rubbing absent, fond circles over her belly. It had been soft and sweet and sad in a way that had made his four-year-old heart drop inside his chest. If he'd been older, he might have recognized it as a smile of farewell, but he'd been only four, and four-year-olds didn't believe in goodbye, not for mamas. So, he'd thought she was sad about something else. Maybe she missed her lap, which had been perfect for holding cross-stitch patterns and squirming little boys.

"Mmm? Oh, I'm fine, baby," she'd murmured, and run her fingers through his hair.

"Then why're you so sad?"

She'd raised an eyebrow at that. "I'm not sad, baby. I'm just thinking about the baby, that's all. How could I be sad when I've got such a wonderful boy with me, huh?" She'd pulled him into a wonderful mother's hug, smashed his nose into the hard side of her belly and the cool, thin fabric of her maternity shift, and he'd been so delighted at the close contact that he'd forgotten her strange, distant eyes and that unnerving, misty smile. He'd smelled her skin, and when he'd drawn a deep breath to absorb as much of her as he could, he'd imagined he could smell Sammy, too, snakes and snails and puppy dog tails underneath the sugar and spice and everything nice that made up his mother.

He'd remembered that look and that smile at bedtime that night, though; the latter had made a brief reappearance as she'd tucked him into bed and brushed the hair from his forehead to plant a kiss there. Once upon a time, he'd believed that kiss was magic to protect him from the monsters that lived outside his window and slept under his bed, and maybe she'd believed it, too, believed it with the feverish, desperate ferocity of a mother on the run. They'd both learned better in the end, though her lesson had come with fire. His lesson had started the minute they put her out, longer but no less ferocious for its miserable longevity. In fact, school wasn't out where that particular lesson was concerned, and he still wasn't sure whose lesson had been the harsher.

His mother must have sensed his worry that night, because she'd given him an extra kiss, smoothed his blankets, and whispered, "Don't worry, Dean. Everything's just fine. The angels are watching over you." So close that her breath had tickled his nose.

He'd taken comfort in that thought once upon a time, captivated by images of fat-faced, golden-winged cherubs and haloed, ephemeral creatures with tender hearts and six-string harps. 

He knew better on that count, too, now, and he wondered how he could've been so naïve. How _she_ could've been, knowing what she'd known? Maybe her deal with Azazael had come with a heaping helping of denial, or maybe she'd needed to cling to the idea that there was a force to balance the madness and evil that had stolen one family and stalked the one she'd made for herself. Maybe it was the simple human stupidity of hope. It hadn't mattered in the end because belief was only so much tissue paper and fairy dust when hard truths came calling, and it had been consumed in a single gulp when she'd burned on the ceiling for her simple-minded heresy of hope. All the belief and hope in the world hadn't put the fire out. The firemen and their hoses had done that, and that help had come too late to do a damn bit of good.

Knowing what he knew now about angels, maybe it was for the best that no trump had blown and no winged angels had descended from on High to intervene. The only difference between heaven's flame and the Devil's was the color of the fire. They both burned with the same terrible heat, and neither cared who or what they burned. Guilt or innocence was as arbitrary as life and death in a game played by indifferent gods high on their mountaintops or low in their subterranean pits in the fiery bowels of the earth. Humans were monkeys with vocabulary as far as the heavenly hosts were concerned, and there was no guarantee of salvation when they came knocking in borrowed meatsuits.

Maybe his mother had known the ugly truth by then and kept it from him in an act of mercy, determined that he should have a childhood unblighted by the pessimism of a hunter's life. Perhaps that explained the remoteness of her eyes and that beautiful, sad smile she'd worn so often that last year. She'd known the truth even as she'd spun him pretty lies at her mother's loom, and she'd realized even as Sammy had grown and yawned and stretched inside her belly with his long, strong legs that would only grow longer that there was no easy road, no gentle hands to shield her from the blows that were coming. Just demons on one side and angels on the other, and none of them with a better nature to which she could appeal. Only judges on one side and executioners on the other, both eager to carry out their duties. Maybe she'd smiled that way because it'd been the only smile she'd had left, a ghostly, reflexive twitch of muscle memory. The rest of her had been long gone, running to beat the devil and knowing it was a race already lost.

She'd been wearing that smile in his dream, that terrible, blank, stretched-plastic smile born of memories run to sepia and wax in the face of onrushing heat. His mother had bent and retrieved the pants from beneath the bed, tugged them out by the cuff like a crazed breech birth, and he'd wanted to look away because her movements were wrong, too, stiff and jerky, the inelegant, drunken gait of a Barbie doll coaxed to reluctant life by sorcerer's magic. She'd walked on the toes of her feet, and the bones of her legs had been visible beneath the waxy, pallid flesh.

_Visible at the angles and the joints, a puppeteer's unfinished framework,_ he'd thought as he'd stared through the window. _But that's not right, because my mother had beautiful, strong legs, a dancer's legs, lithe and fluid, not matchsticks pressed into skin. Sammy got his legs from her, though not the grace. Boy'd step on his own nuts if they weren't so high off the ground. My mother wouldn't walk that way. Not unless…_

And then his mother had turned to face him with the jeans bundled lovingly in her arms, and Dean had understood why she'd walked so unnaturally, canted forward on her toes like a hooker unaccustomed to her stilettos. This Mary had been a Mary of once upon a time and as is, a patchwork Frankenstein of past and Winchester present, and as he'd looked at her, he'd wondered if Castiel hadn't raised her, too, gathered her scattered energy from the four corners and reconstituted her into this abomination. Maybe he'd done it in a twisted act of mercy, though Dean had long since begun to doubt that such a tender marrow ran through angelic veins.

_M-mom,_ he'd rasped.

_Dean,_ his mother had said happily, and her voice had been grating, full of smoke and fire and wet, turned earth. Shadows flickered and squirmed behind her teeth, and he'd turned his mind from what they might have been. She'd smiled in earnest, then, and he'd swallowed a helpless scream as the two sides of her mouth had formed the curve of lips.

One side had been the pink, lovely lips of Mary Winchester as she'd lived and breathed and loved, the Mary Winchester of faded, crinkled family snapshots and of his Castiel-sponsored blast from the past. The pink, lovely lips that had won his father's love and sealed their fate with a desperate, grief-stricken kiss over his corpse. The lips that had sung him and Sammy countless lullabies and had spun him such pretty, dangerous lies in a bid to spare his childhood.

The other side had been a lipless, grinning ruin, a rictus frozen by flame. White teeth and black, charred flesh taut against a yellowing skull. Life and death. Before and after. The contrast had continued neatly from head to toe, the two halves demarcated by her nose. The left side had been pristine; the right had been a mockery, the hard truth behind every cotton-candy memory to which he'd clung. 

_Mom,_ he'd croaked again. It had been the only word that still held meaning for him, and he had thought that if he repeated it enough, if he hit the magic number, he could banish the travesty in front of him and restore his mother to her rightful place as Mother Mary, full of grace and untarnished sanctity.

But the Mary-thing had simply beamed at him with her ruined face, the pants cradled in her arms like a sleeping child. She'd caressed the pants with her blackened fingertips, smoothed wrinkles and creases while bits of her had sloughed and fluttered to the carpet like confetti. She'd shifted with a sound like burning leaves, a rugose, organic crackle that had made his stomach roll, and when she'd dropped her gaze to study the pants, he'd spotted the slick, white gleam of a maggot writhing in the brittle remnants of her hair.

He'd closed his eyes out of desperation then, desperate to escape and convinced that if he could unsee this Mary, he could pull himself from the dream and awaken in whatever bed he'd called his own that night, surrounded by the cool, elderly tangle of the sheets around his calves and the reassuring, sonorous burr of Sam's snores from the next bed. 

But the dream world hadn't wavered, and the ground hadn't shifted under his feet. The dream had held, and he'd eventually opened his eyes again, sure that when he did, she would be close enough to touch. Somehow the act of closing his eyes would've transported him through the thin pane of glass that had separated them, and she would reach out with her withered, fleshless hand and stroke his face as she'd done so often when he'd been small and in the thrall of a fever or a childhood terror. Except that it wouldn't be warm and soft, but cold and hard and pitted, leather and bone and burnt paper. She'd smell wrong, too, wet plaster and ash and disturbed, rancid earth. He'd thought that if he had to smell that, his overburdened mind would simply snap like a rotten bough, and Sam would find him in the morning, catatonic in his bed, still breathing but gone as gone could be, a newly-minted member of the living dead.

He'd still been outside the window when he'd opened his eyes, but she had been closer, close enough for him to realize that her right eye was covered in a milky film, a poached egg nested in the socket. It had gleamed silver in the ethereal, unnatural moonlight of the dream and glistened with gelatinous brilliance.

_I can't,_ he'd thought with dim hysteria. _Send me back to hell if you have to, but fuck you, Jesus, I can't._

Mary had regarded him in silence for a moment with that fixed smile and her cataracted eye, and then she'd shaken out the crumpled pants with crisp, maternal efficiency and begun to fold them. She'd hummed while she'd worked, a reedy, inhuman rasp, and behind the melody he couldn't quite place, he'd heard the distant rattle of a scream, a word he could've deciphered if he'd wanted to. He hadn't wanted to; he hadn't wanted any of this, and so he'd pretended not to hear even as his industrious subconscious had gone right on filling in the blanks.

It hadn't taken her long to fold the jeans despite the handicap of her incongruous limbs. She'd folded the jeans over her forearm and given them a final, authoritative tamp with her denuded hand. The exposed knuckles had clacked like castanets, and powdered bone had risen from her skeletal hand like dust. She'd held out the pants with torpid solemnity, as though she were presenting him with the Gutenberg Bible and not a tatty pair of thrift-store jeans he'd abandoned in a cheap motel.

_Here you go, honey,_ she'd whispered, and thrust the folded square of denim at him.

He'd retreated a pace and shaken his head dumbly. He couldn't bear to touch those ruined hands and desiccated fingers, and the thought of accepting those jeans had inspired a vertiginous, dry-mouthed horror. He'd been struck with the absolute conviction that to take those tainted jeans would be to accept a burden from which he could never flee, not even if Sam should bear him up upon his back and carry him across the earth with his Titans' legs. To take the jeans would be to undertake an unknown and impossible responsibility, and he'd already carried the weight of Atlas upon his frail, human shoulders.

_Take it,_ Dean, his mother had persisted, and her ruined lips had twitched in encouragement.

He'd retreated another faltering step, foot sliding reluctantly backward in that perverse moonwalk of dreams. _No, Mom, I can't._

The two faces of Mary Winchester had merely looked at him, one softly sympathetic, the other the mad, pitiless gaze of bone. _I know, sweetheart. I know. But you have to. You've bought them, and the price was so high. They're yours now. You can't leave them behind._

He'd opened his mouth to protest, to absurdly point out that he'd only paid a buck twenty-five for the godforsaken things and was perfectly willing to eat the loss, but his hand had reached for the pants, resigned to a truth his stubborn ears hadn't wanted to hear. They _were_ his pants, bought and paid for by a crumpled bill and grimy quarter he'd hustled from a soused good old boy over a game of eight-ball, and they were his for good.

_That's my Dean,_ she'd crooned, and the tatters of her charred lips had fluttered and crackled as they'd stretched into an approving smile. _My good boy. I knew you'd do the right thing, honey._

It hadn't felt like the right thing; it had felt like the final step off the precipice and into the bottomless abyss, an impulsive act of deathless suicide, and he'd moaned helplessly when his fingers had breached glass run to syrup and grazed the fabric of his discarded jeans. It had been soft and warm and rotten, not stiff and cool like denim. Fermented fruit pulp and decaying flesh.

_Bet that's how I felt after three days in the ground,_ he'd thought sickly, _like an apple gone to rot in an abandoned root cellar._

A fleeting movement from the corner of his eye, the boy in the closet, hunkered inside with three of his fingers braced against the dirty floor to keep him balanced. Black water had oozed from beneath his feet and between his splayed fingers. He'd surveyed Dean from his crouch, face pinched and hollow, and his eyes had been silver in the moonlight. His mouth had opened in a perfect _O_ of dismay, but what had emerged was his now-familiar refrain.

_Watch, Dean. Watch._ And then, he'd thrown his head back and screamed, a high-pitched, feline yowl that had sent Dean's balls to the shelter of his belly.

He'd recoiled from the shrill, otherworldly cry, turned his face toward the more familiar horror of his desecrated mother, only to find that she, too, had changed. The heretofore unmarred side of her face had begun to bubble and run, strings of burning celluloid that dripped and sizzled as they'd fallen to the floor, and her eyes had turned to silver, too, bright and manic. She'd still been clutching his jeans in her hands, and she'd thrust them at him with her fleshless, melting fingers.

_TAKE THEM!! THEY'RE YOURS!!_ she'd screamed with mad fervor, and the fingers of her bubbling hand had run and spread across the scorched and smoking fabric like tallow. And all the while, her eyes had burned and gleamed like-

Like the eyes in his rearview mirror. "Shit!" He tamped on the brakes, and the Impala, startled from her smooth glide through midnight waters, shuddered and screamed in protest. The sound of locking brakes and burning rubber was eerily reminiscent of the howling in his dreams, and gooseflesh hardened on his arms. He looked in the rearview mirror again, sure that the eyes had been nothing but his imagination, but they were still there, gazing at him with serene implacability. 

_He's in the backseat,_ he thought, and dread gripped his belly in an icy cramp. _The boy from the closet has set up shop in my backseat, and he's brought the pants with him._ He didn't want to think about that, but what he wanted hadn't mattered a tinker's damn in a very long time, and so he found himself wondering what those pants would look like when he turned around, wondering if they'd just be a tatty old pair of Goodwill jeans soiled only with the grit and sweat of too many days on the road and too many nights in seedy motels, or if they'd be the jeans of his dreams, warm and fleshy and covered in the black-fingered marks of his mother's grip.

A voice in his head whispered that he should worry about more important things, like getting to the shotguns nestled in the truck beneath duffels full of rock and table salt and boxes of ammunition, including blessed bullets and homemade silver bullets. Maybe to the iron crowbars tucked beside the spare tire. The voice was right, quite sensible, really, but Dean didn't move. He was convinced that if he tried to get out of the car, he'd just spill bonelessly to the ground and drown in two inches of night-slick blacktop, where a bewildered Sam would find him in the morning. Best to sit there until the feeling returned to his legs and his balls descended from the belltower of the Greater Unitarian Church of Underbelly.

_Get it together, son,_ John barked suddenly inside his head. _Hesitation kills a man as sure as a shot and just as fast. Take the measure of this son of a bitch and find a way to save your ass._

Dean willed his torso to turn. It complied with the creak of tendon and crackle of shifting vertebrae, and then he was face to face with the boy from the closet, who now sat in his backseat, a gaunt, white mushroom that sprouted from the black upholstery with a malevolent beauty. His hands were empty, thank God, and Dean was so relieved by that particular development that he was tempted to piss his pants. The boy's hands sat slackly on his scrawny thighs, thin-fingered and dirty-nailed, though Dean wasn't sure it was dirt that ringed his nails and darkened his ragged cuticles. In fact, he was pretty sure it wasn't.

"Who the hell are you, and what the hell do you want?" he hissed. There was too much fear and not enough badass for his liking, but the cold cramp of dread in his belly had spread to his chest, and his lungs were hard, frozen sacs behind his aching breastbone. That he was talking at all was a minor miracle.

_That's me,_ he thought stupidly, _Dean Winchester, miracle man. First, I rose from the dead like a Lazarus in hand-me-down Levis, and now I'm talking without air in my lungs. Maybe next week, I'll be seeing without eyes in some nuthouse somewhere because I finally lost it and clawed my eyes out. Maybe Sammy'll bust me out and take me on the road like some carny sideshow freak. Bet we could make a killing playing Name That Card or charging ghoulish looky-lous five bucks a pop to jam their dirty fingers into my empty eye sockets to make sure I'm not some con artist fake. Better than hustling pool by a mile, and at least Sammy wouldn't make me sleep in a cage with the geek._

The boy said nothing. He merely raised a bony finger and pressed it to his lips. _Sssh._

"No! I've had just about all I can stand of this cryptic, mumbo-jumbo bullshit. You either tell me what you want, or so help me God, I'm gonna get out of this car and fill you so full of rock salt they'll be passing you 'round a dinner table in Hell."

The boy blinked at him, lids torpid over pale, moonstone eyes. "To warn you," he said, his voice soft and remote, water lapping at the smooth edges of a drain.

"Warn me about what?"

He blinked again and raised his skinny arm. "Watch, Dean. Watch."

"Watch what? Goddammit!"

The boy pointed, his bony finger a birchbark arrow in the dim interior of the Impala.

Dean followed the direction of his finger. His gaze fell on Sam, who slept on, head propped against the passenger window, and unease drew a cold finger down his spine. Sam could sleep like the dead when he was exhausted, but a lifetime of running towards the Devil with John Winchester had taught him to wake at the slightest hint of danger. Exhausted or not, Sam should've come awake the instant the Impala lurched to a stop, should've been looking around to see why they'd stopped in the middle of nowhere, foot trying to step out of the car before his hand could open the door. Sam should've been right beside him with a gun barrel trained on the boy's narrow nose. But Sam only snored, chest rising and falling in the serene rhythm of sleep.

_Maybe he's asleep because I'm having a nightmare, one from which I'll awaken just in time to realize we're about to crash into a bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour. Or better yet, maybe we never made it that far. Maybe Sammy won the argument, and we're still sleeping in that fleapit motel while afternoon deepens to dusk outside the windows and the roaches dance behind the walls. Maybe I'm gonna wake up soon and find myself facedown in a field of faded, cotton flowers, watering them with drool. Totally manly drool, of course._

"Sam? Is it Sam I need to watch? 'Cause I gotta tell ya, I've been keeping a pretty close eye on him his whole damn life, and I'm getting sick and tired of every supernatural asshole in the universe telling me how to do my job."

The boy was unmoved. His arm never wavered. "Watch, Dean. Watch," he said implacably.

Frustration and fear for his soundly sleeping Sam ignited his anger. "I have been watching, goddammit," he bellowed, and slammed his palm on the steering wheel. The Impala sent its disapproval through his stinging skin and into his wrist, where it throbbed dully.

But the boy only continued to point. "Watch," he hissed.

"Fuck yo-," Dean began, and then he stopped, because he saw it. A thin, black rivulet just behind Sam's left ear. It shimmered and shivered in the dim light, and Dean's belly crawled with sickened recognition. It was the darkness. It had escaped the closet, perhaps carried to freedom by the closet boy who sat in his backseat and pointed out this horror like a haughty dauphin. "No," he said flatly. "No, we are not doing this again. We're not, do you hear me?"

"Watch, Dean. Watch," was the only reply, and Dean spun in his seat, determined to break the little bastard's neck.

"You did this. This is your fault. You've got that crap all over you, and now it's on Sam. You get it off."

The boy shook his head. "Watch, Dean. Watch."

The black rivulet behind Sam's ear had grown longer and fatter, a plump, black leech that dangled from his pale, white skin. It pulsed and writhed and stretched its boneless finger toward Sam's shoulder, and Dean found himself remembering a summer afternoon in Tennessee thirteen years ago, when he and Sam had gone for a swim in a muddy creek and come out covered in eagerly suckling leeches. They'd been everywhere, cold boils of alien flesh that had gorged on him and Sammy. Dean had even found one nestled cozily between his toes. Sammy had gotten the worst of it, though. The little bastards had battened on to his scalp, and Dad had spent a fun-filled evening dousing a miserable, hysterical Sammy in salt water. John had finally declared Sammy clean after two dousings, and Sammy had scurried to the motel shower, desperate to cleanse himself of the taint of all those formless mouths kissing his skin with the avidity of a lover.

The scream Sammy had sent out from the bathroom upon the discovery of a final hitchhiker affixed to his scrotum had been a reedy wail of terror that had brought both him and Dad on the run and cost the hotel one flimsy bathroom door. Dad had been hellbent for leather with his finger on the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun, and it was a wonder that John Winchester hadn't inadvertently blown his youngest son's balls off. As it was, Dean had never forgotten the expression on Sam's face as he'd huddled in the shower, legs splayed to reveal the bulbous, well-fed leech that had bulged from his scrotum like a necrotic tumor.

"Getitoff!" Sammy had screamed. "Get it off, Daddy, getitoff!" His voice had been high and shrill, thirteen going on three, and his eyes had been huge inside his bloodless face.

Dad had gotten it off with the help of more salt, and Sam had passed out cold when the leech had surrendered its grip with the slimy, wet _plip_ of a bursting rotten peach. He'd been mercifully unaware when John had closed his fist around the leech in an act of paternal retribution and sent Sammy's stolen blood sluicing over his salt-encrusted fingers. There'd been something perversely ritualistic in the act, and Dean had felt a stirring of awe even as he'd fought a surge of nausea. _A father loves his sons even when he can't,_ he'd thought queasily, and he'd carried that thought with him for the rest of his father's life, a kernel of filial optimism that not even Sam's contempt for Dad could crush.

John had put Sam in his own bed, but Dean had awakened in the night to find Sam burrowed beneath the covers next to him, one arm flopped over Dean's midsection and the other hand curled protectively over the crotch of his rumpled undershorts. Sammy's mouth had been warm and slack against Dean's shoulder, and his breath had warmed the flesh there, blood ebbing from an open wound.

_Who's the leech now, Sammy?_ he'd thought muzzily, mouth and one eye clouded by the limp, sticky fabric of the pillowcase.

Sammy had turned, fingers of one hand brushing Dean's belly in small, fretful strokes while the hand over his crotch had worried the violated flesh beneath. "Get 'em off, Dean," he'd slurred. "Off."

"It's gone, Sammy," he'd whispered. "Been gone."

But logic held no place in the reason of dreams, and so Sammy had persisted in his panicky pleas until Dean had turned in his one-armed embrace, curled his arm around his sweaty nape, and hissed, "I got him, Sammy, got him good," into his ear. "You sleep easy now," he'd said, and Sammy had, limp and clammy with relief. Sam had been all right the next morning, and when Dean had broached the subject of nightmares, he'd claimed he didn't remember. Still, it had taken Sam years to trust himself to muddy waters again, and he always brought a baggie full of salt to the shore with him when he did.

_Get 'em off, Dean,_ ghost-Sammy pleaded inside his head, and Dean wasn't sure if he meant the boy in the closet or the clot of wriggling blackness that hung from the side of his head. Either way, he didn't need to ask twice.

"Get off," he ordered the impossible leech. He reached out his hand to brush it away. "You just get right the hell off of him."

He grimaced in anticipation of sudden cold, but his fingers found nothing but soft warmth, smooth threads between his bewildered fingers. He squeezed, and the odd darkness flexed and shifted in his grip, curled itself around his thumb with cautious intent. Dean swore and jerked his hand back, pulled his offended thumb from that silky, sinuous grip. The black thread retained its graceful, curling, shape for a moment, and then it drooped and settled once more, a startled serpent returning to its vigilant rest. 

"That ain't no leech," he announced to no one in particular. In the backseat, the boy from the closet merely watched.

"You mind telling me what the hell is going on here?" he demanded.

"Watch, Dean. Watch."

"Of course. Don't you need to get back to some creepy-ass Edgar Alan Poe poem? Maybe a sequel to 'The Raven'?"

The boy made no answer, but the radio, which had been faithfully scoring this lunacy with crystal clarity, abruptly exploded into a fullisade of static, and from behind the booze and sin-soaked voice of Jim Morrison came the unmistakable strains of Led Zeppelin.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

_Get 'em off, Dean. Off._ Sammy, thirteen and hiding from the creek leeches in Dean's shadow.

_You've got to take them, honey. They belong to you._ His sainted, ruined mother, holding out a pair of secondhand jeans and looking at him with vacant, silver eyes.

_Watch, Dean. Watch._ The boy from the closet, who watched him from the backseat and dangled his feet into an ever-deepening black pool.

Dean raised a shank, fumbled in his back pocket for his pocketknife, and withdrew it with care. He never took his eyes off the black thread, which now curled possessively around Sam's ear and twitched seductively, a wispy, beckoning finger. He opened the blade. The thread rose, drew back as though affronted. Dean froze and waited, the wooden grain of the handle, smooth from years of use and scrupulous care, hard and cool against his palm. He breathed, and the Impala's engine rumbled in stealthy accompaniment. He waited, _prayed,_ for Sam to stir and blink at him in obnoxious, dazed confusion and casually swat a horsefly or hornet from his face, but Sam slumped still as death against the passenger door, and only the steady rise and fall of his chest told Dean that he was alive. The thread continued to dance and sway.

"Nothing to see here," Dean told it. "Just cleaning the grease from under my nails." He made a show of gently digging the point of the blade beneath the nail bed of his thumb and scraping it along the short, ragged crescent of his nail. He did the same with the nail of his index finger. The thread hung improbably in the air; its posture struck him, absurdly, as inquisitive. "C'mon," he murmured. "C'mon, you son of a bitch."

Finally, the thread settled, and Dean reacted before he could think. His free hand darted out and seized the thread in his fingers, and he lunged across the seat, bringing the blade towards the black tendril writhing in his closed fist. It bunched and squirmed in his grip as he tried to straighten it in preparation for a clean cut. When it couldn't retreat, it elongated with surprising speed and coiled itself around his fingers. It burned where it touched, salt and sand on broken skin, and Dean swore through clenched teeth as he struggled to slice the thread free of Sammy.

"Sam! Wake up, Sam, c'mon!" he ordered. Blood oozed from the jagged, red weals on his fingers, and he thought of the blood splutting from between his father's fingers as he'd closed an avenging fist around a hapless leech. 

Sam didn't wake up, and the thread tightened its serrated grip. The pain in his fingers brightened and deepened, brilliant scarlet edging to black, and he knew that if he didn't win the shooting match soon, his fingers would slip from his hand and tumble to the floorboard, where they'd scatter. Maybe his forefinger would lodge beneath the gas pedal, the better to avenge itself on a winding, rain-slick road. Blood sluiced from his fingers and pattered to the floorboard, and Dean had a fleeting image of eyeless faces and tongueless mouths stretched wide to gather the falling drops.

He tugged harder, hard enough to pull Sam's lolling head off the passenger window and into a grotesque angle, and the thread vibrated in his fingers, a blood-slick loop of razor wire that burrowed deeper into his flesh. Almost to the bone, and damned if it wasn't snaking over his wrist. 

_If it slices an artery, I'm dead. My fingers are gonna be all but useless, so you can forget about a tourniquet. I'll be gone in two minutes unless Sammy wakes up. Some bumpkin from Idaho and his family of spuds'll find me dead in the driver's seat with my hand and wrist all chewed to hell, and when the local cops get here and see the knife in my hand, they'll put two and two together and get the four of suicide. If they're in the advanced class of law enforcement mathematics, they might stop to wonder why Sam isn't dead, too, or maybe they'll think outside the box and decide he killed me and then tried to take his own dirt nap courtesy of carbon monoxide fumes. Never mind that a rural highway isn't exactly a primo location for gassing yourself. They'll make it fit; they'll have to. They've only got one kind of geometry._

_Cut it off, Dean. Right now,_ barked Bobby Singer inside his head. _Cut it off, or that's exactly what's gonna happen._

_But Sammy-,_

_But Sammy nothin'. You might take off part of his ear, but it's nothin' he can't survive. Hell, that crazy ass Van Gogh fellow lopped off an ear for love and went right on bein' bugshit crazy. Only difference between before and after was how he looked when he got his picture taken, and you ain't in no beauty pageant, nor is Sam. You'd be surprised, boy, what you can live without when the alternative is not living at all. Cut or die, son, and whatever you do, do it quick, for God's sake._

He squeezed the wriggling thread with all the strength his flagging fingers could muster, and blood poured from the ragged mouth that had formed below his second knuckle. _Looks like a face,_ he thought dreamily as he prepared to bring the knife down in a blind stroke. _Like a bloody mouth screaming around a gag._ His vision greyed at the edges, obscured by a stealthy, rolling fog, and his upraised hand wavered. The knife slipped in his slackening grip. 

_NOW, Dean!_ Bobby was urgent, but fading, and Dean knew that the thread had pulled him out of reach, dragged him into the depths and left nothing behind but the harrow trails of his clawing fingers. A distant, musing voice wondered if Bobby was with the boy in the closet, squatting on his haunches in the bottomless void of forever.

_NOW, boy, NOW!_ Bobby bellowed, and Dean's hand came down in an act of unthinking obedience, a good soldier following orders.

There was an unearthly howl, and for one stupefied instant, Dean thought, it was the thread, shrieking in mortal agony as it pulsed in his hand. But it was too loud, too familiar. His thoughts turned to Sam, whose head had bounced off the passenger window with a dull, ominous thud when the blade of his knife had sliced through that perverse, elastic tether, but Sam remained still as the grave, mouth closed in a thin, pink line.

It was the boy from the closet. He sat ramrod straight in the backseat, hands clamped to the leather upholstery on either side of his gangly legs and mouth open in an impossible, yawning scream. His head was thrown back in an obscene, grimy ecstasy, his small Adam's apple a tight knot limned by the weak illumination of the dome light. The caterwauling went on and on, a never-ending note that spiraled into inhuman registers. Eventually, his ears gave up the chase, but the sound traveled to his bones and teeth, where it rattled and hummed like short, sharp bursts of static electricity.

And yet, beneath the cacophony was a simple, haunting refrain. _Watch, Dean. Watch._ Spoken with stark, indifferent finality, the deathbed confession of an automaton. _Watch, Dean. Watch._

The radio blared, rising in volume to meet the coarse, feline screams from the backseat, and Dean was not surprised at all to hear "Immigrant Song" warbling from the speakers. The Winchester Family Circus and Traveling Freakshow was in full swing, and he was in center ring, juggling knives and losing with every toss. The only thing that could be better would be the appearance of Mary Winchester nee Campbell, and there was no guarantee she wouldn't show up before the festivities were over, rising from the dark of the backseat like mist to present him with the jeans he'd tried so hard to leave behind. Maybe if he looked up right now, a miniature version of his Wrangler foundlings would be dangling from the rearview mirror and she'd be sprawled on the hood and grinning at him through the windshield with her ruined face, the bastard child of June Cleaver and Tawny Kitaen.

That image was more than his overwrought mind could stand, and he brought his fisted hand to his mouth. He was going to cram his knuckles into his mouth, to press his lips against his teeth until he tasted copper and the world righted itself on a wash of salt and iron and sticky, wet heat, and then he did taste copper, and the world lurched vertiginously on its axis because he remembered. He dropped his gaze to his clenched, bloodied fist and forgot how to breathe.

His hand was full of Sam's hair. A great, twining hank of it that filled his palm and erupted from between his fingers like wet clots of rich earth. It twitched feebly in his hand, the death throes of a dying rattlesnake. It was longer than it had any right to be. Even during his most rebellious hippie Sasquatch phase, when he'd been a devout apostle of all things Fuck John Winchester and the Horse He Rode In On, Sam's hair had never exceeded shoulder-length, yet the strands that curled limply around Dean's numb, blood-pickled fingers and clung to the hard pikes of his wrist bones reached nearly to his elbow.

"What the hell?" he croaked. It was a dry, cracked sob. The radio kept blaring, bleating its tinny promise to march on Valhalla, and in the backseat, the boy from the closet screamed and screamed into Dean's bones like ague. It went on and on and on and-

And then Sam was blinking and rubbing the sleep from his eyes and looking at Dean in logy incomprehension. "Dean?" Sleepy and confused, five years old and demanding to know why the Impala was on the shoulder of a remote highway in the middle of the night while Dad stood by a ditch with his legs wide apart and urine splashing to the earth like stardust. Then, "Dean. Jesus Christ." Not five anymore, but every bit of twenty-five, and horrified.

"I had to do it, Sammy," Dean said. "It was a demonic leech or something. Had to get it off." He held up his bloody hand and its precious proof.

"A demonic leech? Dean, that's my hair. That's all." Sam was eyeing his ravaged fingers and busily pulling off his flannel shirt to use as a bandage. 

"The hell it is, Sam," he insisted stubbornly. "Last I checked, your hair didn't have a habit of chewing a guy's fingers off."

"Dean." It was plaintive, pitying. He leaned across the seat and made to uncurl Dean's fingers.

"Don't give me that crap, Sam," he snapped, and pulled his wounded hand out of Sam's grasp.

"What crap?"

"You know what crap, Sam. That pitying there-there bullshit you pull every time you think I don't know what I'm talking about. You've been doing it ever since I came back, and it's really starting to piss me off."

"What do you want me to do, Dean, huh?" Sam countered. "You expect me to believe that a demonic leech attacked me while we were driving down the highway in New York?"

"I know it sounds crazy, Sam, but yeah. Is it any crazier than any of the other stuff we've been asked to believe, stuff we know is true? Most people don't believe in ghosts or vampires or werewolves or in a hundred other things we hunt every day, but that doesn't change the fact that they're out there. Hell, Sam, we know for a fact that angels and demons and Hell exist, and people have been fighting over that since they first crawled out of their holes in the rock. So, I don't think I'm asking all that much here."

Sam's jaw twitched, and Dean could feel the doubt radiating from his pores like sour sweat, but finally, he gave a single, jerky nod. "Show me."

Dean let out a long, shuddering breath and opened his fingers. The movement inspired a searing pain in his hand, a gaping mouth open in a toothless scream, and more blood poured from the cut and soaked his t-shirt and the crotch of his jeans.

_Damned if it doesn't look like I went Bobbitt and lopped my pecker off,_ he thought stupidly, and snorted laughter. He'd lost more blood than he'd realized, and he closed his eyes against a sudden wave of nauseated vertigo. _Don't worry, buddy. I like you right where you are._ The thought was thick and ponderous inside his skull, and oblivion tugged at the corners of his mind with nimble fingers. Another few minutes, and he'd be out cold, limp and mute in the driver's seat.

"Don't worry, Sam," he slurred. "It isn't as bad as it looks. Few stitches and I'll be fine. Besides, I got the son of a bitch." He flexed his open palm in weary triumph.

"Dean," Sam said quietly, and Dean knew even before he looked down what he would see.

A lank hank of Sam's hair lay in his palm, tacky with blood and oddly fetal, an embryo wrenched from an unsuspecting womb. It was dark and matted and cold, but just hair for all that. It neither pulsated nor twitched, nor did it radiate a sly, malevolent sentience. It was nothing but keratin and protein, and it emitted nothing but the faint smells of cheap, drugstore shampoo, late-autumn sunshine-cider apples and burning leaves-and Sam's sweat. That most of all, stronger and sharper than the coppery tang of blood. Just Sam's hair, a piece of his little brother in his palm like a holy relic, the hair of Saint Samuel, taken from him by the knife of his brother, who was damned.

_Another smell, too,_ whispered the thin, spidery voice of the boy in the closet. _A deeper, uglier scent you don't want to acknowledge, much less name. It's the smell of fire and brimstone, cordite and damnation. It's the same rotten stink that drifts from Sam's clothes when the wind is right and you're not tired enough to pretend you don't smell it. It's on his skin, and lately, it's left on everything he touches, an identifying marker that raises the hackles on your neck and turns your stomach. You don't want to smell it because it's the unmistakable stench of All Gone Wrong, and you spent four months and forty years drowning in it-stewing in it-so Sam would never have to. And if it's on his skin and in his hair, then that means it was all for nothing._

_Are you sure it's Sam you brought back?_

"Sam, I swear that hair wasn't a hair when I cut it off," he protested weakly. "It was moving and growing. It was getting longer and fatter. Sam, I swear-,"

"I believe you," Sam said, but he refused to meet Dean's gaze. Instead, he returned his attention to the momentarily forgotten flannel shirt. He picked it up and smoothed it out and stretched it until the scratchy, prickling fabric formed a loose bandage.

"Not exactly the most comfortable bandage material," Dean pointed out.

Sam scowled at him. "Maybe not, but it's what we got. It's either this, or you can bleed to death. Your choice." Sam held out the makeshift bandage and waited expectantly.

Dean sighed and held out his hand in surrender. The hair lay in his palm, stupid and lifeless and silent. Sam's scowl deepened, and for one elated instant, Dean thought he'd seen it, a flash of stealthy movement from the hair that betrayed its true identity, but then Sam reached out and tweezed the hair from his sticky, filthy palm with a grimace of disgust. 

"Sam, don't-," he began, sure that it was a ruse, that the hair would spring to renewed life at Sam's touch and devour his arm to the elbow before Sam could even scream. It would be over in seconds, and both of them would bleed to death long before the first curious passerby decided to wonder why a cherry 1967 Impala was sprawled on the shoulder like a wayward drifter lost to the stupor of burning dreams.

"Dean," Sam said, and Dean subsided. He was out of magic, and Sam was out of faith. 

Dean waited, braced himself for the frisson of understanding that must surely come once Sam touched it, but Sam's face never changed. There was no cry of revulsion. One minute, the hair was in Sam's fingers, a flea plucked from Dean's flesh, and the next, it disappeared out the driver's side window, where it lay on the asphalt like a bit of shredded rubber, just another scrap of garbage left by some hick whose great-grandkids would be cleaning up the mess.

"Sam-,"

But Sam wasn't listening. He was busily tying the flannel shirt around Dean's wrist to stop the flow of blood from his fingers. He cinched the knot tight, brow furrowed in concentration, and then wrapped the excess fabric around Dean's fingers.

"Can you feel your fingers?" he asked when he was finished.

Dean snorted. "Hell, yeah, I can feel 'em. Hurt like a bitch, too."

Sam nodded and gave the makeshift bandage a final tug. "That should hold until we can get to a hospital."

"I don't need a hospital."

"Like hell you don't, Dean. Those cuts are almost to the bone."

"I've had worse."

"Since when, Dean?" Sam demanded. "'Cause I don't remember your fingers ever looking like a beaver mistook them for Vienna sausages before." 

His head wobbled on the stem of his neck. He was so tired, so sick in his guts and in the charred, sad remnants of his soul. His vision swam with exhaustion, and his eyelids drooped, and he was tempted to let go, to let his head loll bonelessly against the headrest and slip into oblivion. 

He laughed mirthlessly. "You missed out on that part of the tour, Sammy."

Sam said nothing, but Dean could hear the muscles in his jaw creaking. Finally, "Dammit, Dean, I did everything I could, and I'm sorry it wasn't good enough."

"I know you did, Sammy. Nothing to be sorry for. I'm just saying that this isn't the worst the world can do." He tried to waggle his fingers and was promptly rewarded with a bright flare of pain and a sudden dampening of the haphazard bandage.

"Jesus, Dean. I'm driving." 

"I'm fine to drive," Dean protested feebly, but Sam was already out of the car and trotting to the driver's side.

"Scoot over," Sam ordered, and when Dean could only move sluggishly toward the recently-vacated passenger seat, he manhandled him into position with a quick, decisive lift of his arms.

"You act like you've done this before," Dean joked as he sank into the seat, hand cradled to his sternum.

"I volunteered at a hospital my freshman year at Stanford," Sam muttered absently as he threw the Impala into drive.

"Yeah?"

"Just because I stopped hunting doesn't mean I stopped giving a damn." 

Sam tapped the accelerator, and the Impala roared into urgent life, as though she knew that time was of the essence. She streaked down the highway, sleek and predatory, and the steady thrum of her horsepower settled in the center of Dean's chest like a second heartbeat, clean and familiar and strong. She was his girl, the only one who'd never left him, had never called it quits when the road got hard, and he let himself fall into her comforting, steel embrace.

He was almost asleep when the glint of silver caught his eye. He blinked in surprise, and the breath caught in his throat. He was sure it was his mother, crouched improbably on the floorboard and gazing up at him with her dreadful, quicksilver eyes. Any minute now, blackened, emaciated arms would slither forth from the darkness to offer him the jeans he'd left behind, and if he refused them, she would curl her wizened, beef-jerky fingers around his ankles and pull him under, into the darkness from which no one ever returned. He would disappear without a sound, and when he found himself again, he wouldn't be alone, but with the boy from the closet and Bobby, three luckless fools who'd fallen through the looking glass and discovered that Wonderland had a Hell to call its own.

And with his mother, of course, Mary Campbell Winchester, mad hatter and white rabbit. They'd be the guests of honor at a tea party without end, and when the tea had been drunk and the crumpets eaten, she would offer him the jeans again. And if he still refused, then she would put on her crown and become the Queen of Hearts, and it would be off with his head. She'd play croquet with his head until she was bored, and when she'd wearied of the game, she'd roll his head down the hill, where twin footsoldiers named Jack and Jill would find it. 

Hopefully, Sam wouldn't come tumbling after.

He opened his mouth to warn Sam, but then his eyes adjusted and he realized it wasn't Mary down there in the dark, determined to deliver his destiny in a pair of donated jeans. It was only the blade of his pocketknife, winking sullenly at him from the gloomy recesses of the floorboard. He didn't remember dropping it; so much of the encounter with the hair leech was already receding into the topsy-turvy, Dalian twilight of dreams. He supposed he must've, though, because it was on the floor, and maybe that was for the best, really, because God knew what Sam would think if he saw that. He might even think that Dean had snapped and tried to kill him while he slept.

So instead, Dean looked out the passenger window and said, "I better not catch you plugging that IPod atrocity into my stereo system."

Sam snorted.

"Sam-," Dean said. "I really did-,"

"We'll talk about it later, Dean."

But Dean knew they wouldn't. Not later by any definition. Sam didn't want to. It was in the stiff set of his shoulders and his white-knuckled grip on the wheel and the endless, abrasive scrape of his teeth as they shifted like tectonic plates inside his mouth.

_What are you afraid of, Sammy? What won't you tell me?_

It was amazing how much Sam looked like Dad when he considered a subject closed. If Dean narrowed his eyes and looked at Sam in profile, he could see John in the set of his jaw and the tightness of his eyes. But it hurt to do that, turned a dirty-nailed finger deep inside an old wound, and so he didn't. Instead, he closed them altogether and let his head find the glass and steel cradle Sam had so recently abandoned. He smelled Sam on the glass and the leather headrest, just Sam, as he should be, uncorrupted by anything but stale sweat and two days' road dust. It was comforting, as close to home as Dean could remember, and Dean surrendered to it gladly.

He was almost asleep when the boy from the closet tugged on his shoulder with cold, dirty fingers. 

_Watch, Dean. Watch._ His breath was icy and carried with it the faint tang of aluminum and copper, as though he'd placed pennies underneath his tongue once upon a time and never taken them out. 

The boy's voice was urgent, and Dean wanted to listen, to be vigilant, but he'd been watching since he was four-and-a-half, and he was tired. He'd gone to Hell so Sam wouldn't have to, and now Sam was in the driver's seat, whole and human and driving to beat the reaper to the nearest podunk clinic. That was enough for now, more than Dean had any right to ask for, all things considered. Let someone else watch for a while. Just a little while, while he slept. He'd earned that much, at least.

He opened his mouth to tell the kid to piss off, but the words were gritty and too heavy in his mouth, and so he swallowed them instead and let them pull him down into a dreamless sleep.

While he slept, the miles and the Impala rolled on. She was on the blackwater river again, moving silently through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The phrase "the hour of none" was originally penned by Stephen King in _Lisey's Story_ , much as I wish I'd thought of it. My most profound thanks to Mr. King for introducing such an evocative phrase to the English language.


	3. Chapter 3

The pocketknife was still there the next morning, lying impotently on the floorboard and pointing west like the needle of a broken compass. Part of Dean was surprised to see it there. He’d thought Sam would’ve collected it as he was cleaning out the Impala and bedding them down for the night in the Pleasant Terrace Inn, the grossly misnamed kitsch horror that he’d chosen as their base of operations in Tarry Town. But Sam had been in full-on mother hen mode last night, hellbent on getting Dean to the hospital before he bled to death in the passenger seat, and so maybe he hadn’t had time to be as thorough as usual. 

Or maybe it was just another symptom of Sam 2.0, the strange new Sam he’d found in his little brother’s skin when he’d stumbled into that hotel room with grave dirt still in his hair like lice. There were so many of those differences now, new wrinkles in once-familiar skin. Dean was beginning to lose count, and he found more every day-new shadows on Sam’s cheeks, new cuts that Sam couldn’t explain and chose not to even if he could, new freckles on the backs of his hands and dusted over his broad shoulders. Each change he catalogued reshaped Sam in an imperceptible yet fundamental way that Dean’s eyes couldn’t see. His heart could, though, and each day, it sank a little lower inside his chest. 

Then again, maybe he was full of shit. Sam wasn’t the only one who’d changed since Lilith had sent her demonic Pound Puppies to fetch him like a bleeding, screaming stick. He’d changed, too, and not for the better. He was twenty-nine going on fifty, and there were mornings that he felt twice that. At first, he’d told himself that the heaviness in his limbs and the ache in the center of his chest were temporary side effects of resurrection, and there were times-when he was hip-deep in a willing conquest or two from the local honky tonk, for instance-that he’d believed it. Why not when he’d been so giddy, so relieved to find himself alive and unscarred by either lash or flame? And who but Lazarus could’ve proved him wrong? Sam, he supposed, since he’d been the first Winchester to beat the devil and come back whole, but Sam had never decided to care and share on that particular topic, and Dean hadn’t been eager to know. He’d been too afraid of what he might hear, too preoccupied by Azazel’s mocking question. _Are you sure it’s Sam you brought back?_ So he’d buried the question as deep as it would go and prayed it would never find its way to the light. By the time he’d realized his mistake, it had been too late, and his hands had proven too clumsy for the delicate task of digging it up. 

But the heaviness and the ache always returned, nestled against him in the night while he slept. Sometimes, he thought it was Sam, come to bed with him in a bid to chase away the cold that seldom left him or to bridge the miles and months that separated them even as they stood back to back in a dilapidated farmhouse and blasted restless ghosts into the hereafter with volleys of rock salt. Sometimes, he thought they were back in Tennessee, chest to chest in an anonymous hotel bed and riding out the relentless heat of a Southern summer. He thought the weight was Sam, _Sammy,_ thirteen years old and pleading with him to get it off, Dean, getitoff. But when he woke, the bed was empty, and more often than not, so was Sam’s. 

The weight and the ache frightened him. It was unnatural for so few years to rest so heavily upon his bones, and he couldn’t shake the suspicion that something had gone horribly wrong during his grand re-entrance. Never mind the Good Housekeeping seal stamped on his right arm in the shape of a hand; Castiel might’ve an angel, but he’d also chosen a traveling salesman from Indiana as his unwitting disguise, for God’s sake. Choices like that made Dean question his judgment and the caliber of his Divine mojo. Man could’ve chosen anyone as his earthly amanuensis, and he’d picked an anonymous schlub from the middle of nowhere instead of a badass like, say, Kris Kristofferson. It hardly took a rocket scientist to see that his holy emissary wasn’t one himself. The more he thought about it, the more Dean wanted to weep. 

Angelic aesthetics notwithstanding, Dean simply felt _wrong,_ as though the earth from which Castiel had refashioned him had been seeded with salt or spread too thinly over his bones. The hand that had midwifed him into the world had been too hasty, too rough in its coaxing grip. He was brittle, riddled with cracks, through which seeped a blood too thick for his veins. He was afraid to move too quickly, lest the sudden movement cleave him in half and leave him so much twitching clay at Sam’s feet. His chest was too small and his eyes were too big, and it hurt to breathe unless he was three sheets to the wind or drowning in the jasmine and lavender scent of a woman’s cheap perfume. 

Maybe it wasn’t Sam who’d changed at all. Maybe it was him, seeing things through the new madness of his unexpected redemption. Maybe Sam had always been this aloof, remote as the sea, intrigued by his own secrets and too confident in his own counsel to give a damn what Dean or anyone else thought. It would fit, if it were true. After all, Sam had run away to California on his long, redwood legs and left him and Dad behind in the soot and ash of a smoldering Kansas farmhouse that hadn’t fit into his American dream. Maybe Sam was the same as ever, while he floundered and itched with madness inside his strange, new skin. 

He stared at the pocketknife and fought the urge to scratch his forearm until blood beaded from the weals left by his nails. His bandaged hand itched badly enough as it was, and throbbed in spite of the Percocet and Demerol he’d charmed from a mousy clinic pharmacy tech who was probably still massaging his memory into her flushed, moist skin with the aid of KY and two stiff, needy fingers. The stitches prickled and stung with the miserable scut work of healing, and if he curled or flexed them too much, pain flared at the knuckles and drifted to his fingertips like smoke, carried by nerves and restless blood. He curled them to remind himself just how much it hurt and winced at the obliging rush of pain. The gauze shifted restively, and he spared it a cursory glance. It was stiff with dried blood and gone yellow at the top from iodine and draining fluid. He’d need to change it soon, but not now. Now he was concerned with his pocketknife. 

He didn’t know why he’d come looking for it. Because it was evidence, he supposed, though he was no longer sure of what. Last night, in the dark of the highway and with his blood sluicing from his lacerated fingers and filling his chest with a perverse, sticky warmth, he’d been convinced that Sam’s hair was alive. It had been the only truth that mattered in his firmament, as immovable and inviolate as the knowledge that his name was Dean Winchester. In the cool, clear light of an upstate New York morning, however, that surety had begun to dissolve, to acquire the warped, illusory sheen of a nightmare. Only the steady, burning throb of his mutilated hand told a different story, one that pulsed and whispered uneasily beneath the mending flesh of his fingers and winnowed toward his heart with every heartbeat. 

_If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee,_ he thought morbidly. He wondered what Castiel would think if Dean crunched up some powdered nirvana and hacked off his hand in the hotel sink. He doubted his gesture would be well received. Well, then, he supposed they could give him a slap on the wrist for all he cared. He snorted and blinked and wiped the grit from his eyes and made a mental note not to take any more Percocet on an empty stomach. 

_You’re out here gawping at that knife because you’re looking for more hard proof of what your hand already knows,_ Bobby piped up from the distant recesses of his mind. _You can tell yourself it’s bullshit all you want, but you know it ain’t, and what’s worse, the lie brings no damn comfort. Sam doesn’t want to hear it, all but stopped his ears when you brought it up this morning, but you’ve got no choice but to hear it. You don’t have the luxury of pretending you don’t or can’t, because if you do, there’s a good chance the whole damn world’ll fall apart. So you’re out here with your painkiller hangover, looking for proof that you’re not out of your goddamned mind._

And there it lay. It would be the easiest thing in the world to open the passenger door and pick it up, even with his bandaged hand. A matter of three motions. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t shake the withering suspicion that the knife was now as tainted as the jeans he’d left behind in that squalid hotel room three days ago, and that to pick it up was to accept a responsibility from which he couldn’t run and from which there would be no reprieve. If he bent down and picked it up, the next time he put it down would be when his fingers went slack for the last time and some merciful hunter doused them in gasoline to keep them from digging their way out a second time. He’d had a hard, bitter lifetime of those responsibilities and wanted no more. All he wanted from the world now was to sleep without nightmares and the guilty certainty that while he slept, someone else was dying. 

There was no question of leaving the pocketknife behind. It wasn’t a pair of thrift-store jeans, bought on a whim for pocket change. It was a gift from Dad, the first knife that had been his alone. Dad had given it to him on his tenth birthday with a fond ruffle of his hair and a gruff admonition to keep it clean and well out of Sammy’s curious, eager reach. He’d spent the rest of his birthday afternoon turning it over in hands pink and raw from making snowballs from the dirty slush that fell from the eaves of Bobby’s front porch. The handle had been glossy with polish, and the blade had been pristine, unsullied by layers of whetstone dust and years of sticky, dirty, bloody fingerprints, and he had gazed at the reflection captured by the virgin steel and done his best to imitate his father’s unsmiling expression. That blade had provided a window into the future, and he had cherished it, taken it out in the weeks and months that followed and played an exotic version of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.” _Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the bravest Winchester of them all?_ He’d never told anyone about that rare concession to his childhood imagination, especially not Dad, who would’ve grunted and dismissed it as a waste of mental space better devoted to ghost lore and how best to store guns and ammunition in cold weather. It had been his rare and precious secret. 

That knife had accompanied him through innumerable moves and eased the sting of uprooting, tucked securely in the back pocket of his jeans or secreted in his tennis shoes or stowed inside his duffel bag, interred beneath layers of neatly rolled socks and precisely folded shirts. Once, he’d even found it riding snugly in the crotch of his underwear, an army-surplus soldier lying in wait for unsuspecting fingers. He’d kept it long after the appearance of sharper, more potent blades, blades with teeth and hooks and pedigrees steeped in violence and blood. It had served as a touchstone, a reminder of years past, when his father had sometimes remembered he was his father and not a mercenary saddled with hapless hostages to his turbulent fortunes. It had been his worrystone in the dark years of Sam’s adolescence, when hero worship had soured to sullen contempt and entire nights had passed in tense, poisonous silence while Sam’s anger had seethed from his pores with the salty tang of sweat and hot blood. Sometimes, when the silence had settled over his skin, needling and abrasive as fiberglass spores, he’d slipped his hand into the pocket of his jeans and curled his fingers around it. He’d cradled it in the loose hammock of his fingers, or, when the fighting had reached its miserable crescendo and the house was ringing with the hoarse strains of fraying nerves and unraveling bonds, squeezed it until the bite of the wood into the soft, sweaty flesh of his fingers had dulled to a bloodless, oddly pleasant ache. The knife was his anchor, his way to find true north when the world upended on its axis and left him groping in the dark for firm ground on which to plant his feet. It wasn’t as flashy as a pair of ruby slippers, but it was what he’d had, and magic was magic whether you found it in a pair of ruby-encrusted Guccis or a cheap pocketknife with twenty years of boy sweat varnishing the handle. 

He’d parted with it only once in those twenty years, had slipped it into Sammy’s duffel on the night he’d left for Stanford in the hopes that it would serve Sam as it had served him and remind him of home. He’d hoped that Sam would see it as a breadcrumb that would lead him home if his road to the promised land proved too winding or too lonely. 

Some breadcrumb. When he’d gone into Sam’s room that night, drawn to the sudden emptiness and Sam’s abruptly vacated life, the pocketknife had been on his bed, small and inexplicably lost atop the coverlet. Until that moment, he’d thought-hoped-that it was Dad Sam hadn’t wanted, but the knife on the coverlet had removed all doubt. It was Winchester that Sam had rejected, the name and all the truths and sordid history it carried. He’d been embarrassed by the blood in his veins and the secondhand clothes on his back and the father hellbent on a retribution he could never earn. He’d been ashamed of Dean, the older brother with more ego than sense and axle grease underneath his fingernails instead of printer’s ink. His sacrifices hadn’t mattered a damn, had, in fact, been a source of red-cheeked shame for Sam. He’d wanted the good life, a house and a dog and two-point-four kids in suburbia. There’d been no place for a demon-obsessed father and a greasemonkey brother in his postcard future. The pocketknife had been just another dirty, hand-me-down reminder of all he’d been so eager to forget, and so he’d left it behind with the bitter memories and the posters on the wall and the orphaned socks who’d lost their brothers in the merciless gloom of the closet and the stale, sepulchral darkness of the world beneath the bed. 

Dean had snatched the knife from the bed and loosed it on the posters with a savage, tooth-bared fury, blinking in time to the pounding of his heart as the blade severed two-dimensional carotids and opened astonished mouths in glossy paper stomachs. He’d taken special delight in decapitating Scott Stapp of Creed, that Muppet-headed tool with a God complex that made Dean’s eyes threaten retinal detachment with every roll. He’d been positively giddy as Stapp’s head had drooped forlornly from the wall, and he’d laughed as he’d torn the poster from the wall, the laughter as stuttering and discordant as the sound of tearing paper. He’d thought to wad it up and tapdance on the pieces, a grave dancer grinding the bones of his enemy underfoot, but the strength had ebbed from his legs in a dizzying rush, and he’d had to clutch at the tatters of the poster for support, his trembling hand clutching Stapp’s outturned palm, which had been severed at the forearm. 

He’d leaned against the wall, hand pressed to Stapp’s palm as if he were seeking absolution, head down and chest heaving with a mixture of exertion and betrayal. If anyone had been looking, they might’ve thought he was praying, asking Scott Stapp to lift up his voice and call Sam back. But he’d been too spent for prayer, too embittered by endless one-sided conversations tossed from the window of the Impala as she rode the highway to waste his breath. He’d just been trying to find solid ground again. He’d swallowed a mouthful of sour saliva and spat more of it onto Stapp’s stupid, upturned face, and then he’d stalked from Sam’s abandoned room and spent the night stretched across the front seat of the Impala with a bottle of Beam. He’d cursed Sam and told the dashboard that he didn’t care if he never saw Sam again. And he’d told himself he meant it. In the cool, consoling embrace of the car, he’d even believed it. 

In the morning, he’d shambled into the Samless house that had seemed too small until Sam was no longer in it, dry-swallowed two Tylenol, and spent a bleary-eyed morning taping Sam’s posters together again, mending guts and reattaching limbs through the miraculous healing powers of scotch tape. He’d even done a painstaking Frankenstein job on Stapp, the smug turd, though he’d allowed himself the mean, fleeting pleasure of flipping the bastard off when he was finished. He’d smoothed out the wrinkles and smudges and replaced the posters in their former resting places. He’d measured to be sure, carefully grafted them onto the patches of bare wall left by their removal. Just in case Sam came back. 

But Sam never had come back. Not for obedience, and not for him. He’d been long gone. Not even Ma Bell and her endless miles of fiberoptic wires could call him back. He’d been chasing the tail of a California comet, dazzled by its brilliance and blinded to everything but the promise of a life without monsters. On the rare occasions his voice had drifted down the wire, it had been tinny and distant, drifting like smoke to curl around Dean’s ear in a whisper and dissipate before his heart could find it. Hard words had done what all the years of monsters with slavering jaws and filthy claws could not, and Sam had grown as remote and untouchable as the sun, a warmth that Dean remembered with savage fondness and cursed with wounded fury. He’d called on Christmas and on Thanksgiving, but those calls were acts of duty he couldn’t shirk, and though Dad had stubbornly insisted that Sam would come back when his pride had settled and he’d realized how hard the world was without them to see him through it, Dean had understood that it was forever. Sam was every bit the father he hated and the brother he pitied, and he kept to the roads he chose no matter how lonely the course they set. 

Dean had been right, much to his father’s dour chagrin. Sam had stayed gone, and he’d still _be gone_ if Dean hadn’t turned up on his fairytale doorstep in the middle of the night with handfuls of the past in his pockets and crusted under his nails. Dean had dragged him back into the life he’d abandoned, not kicking and screaming, but limp and glassy-eyed with shock and grief. If Dean thought about it, he could still remember the frozen stiffness with which Sam had sat in the passenger seat, as though rigor mortis, cheated of its prize in Jess, had stolen into him instead. 

He’d wondered, in the years since, what Sam must’ve thought, seeing him there in his kitchen, grinning like a Cheshire cat and bringing tidings of faraway truths Sam had tried so hard to forget. He’d thought the smile was benign, a welcome blast from the past that would set Sammy at ease with its smug, aggravating, yet endearing familiarity, but in retrospect, maybe to Sam it had been the leer of the big, bad wolf, come to huff and puff and blow his house down. Considering the way things turned out, Dean thought Sam was closer to right. His house most certainly had blown down, and taken his golden-haired princess with it. 

_Maybe to Sammy, I was the boogeyman at the door, the Headless Horseman who flouted the rules and chased young Ichabod across the bridge even when all the rules said I couldn’t. Maybe he’s spent the past four years wishing me back into a grave he dug at seventeen. Maybe he was secretly relieved when the hounds came calling, and all that talk of saving me was the restless muttering of a guilty conscience. Maybe lowering me into the ground was a load off his back because that meant I couldn’t spring from the closet and stomp his castles flat anymore. But then I ruined it by rising from the dead. Maybe Sammy’s pissed because no matter what he does, he can’t shake me._

Maybe it would’ve been better for Sam-for all of them-if he’d stayed gone, hidden and willfully oblivious in his nine-to-five, ivory-tower world. Maybe Dad would still be alive, writhing in the grip of his personal demons and swearing vengeance on all the rest, and maybe Sam would still be Sam, spared the rending kiss of Jacob’s knife and in possession of his soul. Maybe if he’d found Dad alone, he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night with the memory of dirt in his mouth and the hot-tar reek of sulfur in his nose. 

_Bullshit,_ growled Bobby impatiently. _And while it might be a fine blend of that particular substance, it’s still bullshit. If Sam had wanted you dead, he’d’ve done what he ought and burned your bones to ashes. But he didn’t because he loved you too much to light you up like a charcoal briquet and watch you burn, and because somewhere in his guts, he was hoping you’d come back._

_Or maybe the idea of burning my body while my soul was roasting in Hell was too much to handle. Maybe that’s why you didn’t do it yourself after Sam left with dirt on his hands and tears on his face and self-loathing in his gut like dimestore hooch._

Bobby made no reply, and that was fine by Dean. The Vicodin and the early-morning brightness made him dry and logy, and he was tired of talking to himself without moving his mouth. The sooner he retrieved his pocketknife, the sooner he could retreat to the cool dimness of the motel room and revive himself beneath the feeble, sputtering spray of the shower. He slowly rolled his neck to ease the tension coiled in the muscles like incipient fever and winced at the unflattering creak and grind of cervical vertebrae. 

_Twenty-nine isn’t as young as it used to be,_ he thought dully, and spat on the butt-studded parking lot asphalt. The saliva glistened for a moment in the morning light before it disappeared into the black macadam. 

Another weary roll of his neck, and then he reached out with his good hand and opened the passenger door. The metal of the door handle was cool as a parting kiss on his fingertips, and he paused to savor the unexpectedly pleasant sensation. The door swung gracefully outward in invitation, and he was tempted to climb inside and let his girl take care of him a while, offer him a refuge from a world he no longer understood. She’d be more comfortable than the rough, nettlesome embrace of bedsheets gone grey with age and threadbare from too much industrial detergent. She’d smell better, too, leather and Armor-All and warm flannel, the ghosts of his father and Sam in kinder days. 

He quashed the impulse. The stop at the podunk clinic to mend his lacerated hand had cost them precious time, and Halloween and the Horseman beckoned. The former had already settled here, the evidence of its presence scattered throughout the town. Most of the houses they’d passed on their way into the town center had boasted jack-‘o’-lanterns perched atop porch railings and leaning jauntily against sagging front steps, and the storefronts had been festooned with paper pumpkins and rubber bats and cheap cotton spidersilk. And the Horseman, naturally. Him most of all. A few unexplained deaths and the hysterical gibberings of local tosspots and horny teenagers on the hook for unauthorized necking in Mom’s station wagon had done little to convince town fathers that paying such gleeful homage to Tarrytown’s most infamous citizen was unwise. The legend of Ichabod Crane and his demonic pursuer had transformed the town from a sleepy, forgotten backwater into a prosperous hamlet, and its seasonal tourist trade hinged on the fate of a neurotic schoolmaster who’d drawn his first breath and his last from the imagination of Washington Irving. The fatcats knew whereof their provincial bread was buttered, and they weren’t about to draw down the shutters and erase the unofficial town mascot on his biggest night of the year. 

So, the Horseman was everywhere. His seat of power was in the town square, where a giant statue of him astride his fiery steed presided over the square and the clutch of quaint shops( _shoppes,_ Dean’s brain insisted. _Dean, old buddy, you’d better believe they’re called_ ‘shoppes’. _You can practically hear the double-p before the shopkeepers ever open their mouths_.)that lined either side of it, but his influence spread into the shops themselves, stamped inexpertly onto silkscreened t-shirts or airbrushed onto overpriced postcards. He hadn’t been there yet, but he was willing to bet that the local greasy spoon-housed in a picturesque Colonial cottage and called an “eatery” with disturbing insistence by the proprietors, no doubt-would feature him on the menu, probably in the guise of a burger or pumpkin pie. 

_Better not use horse meat in the burgers,_ muttered a morbid voice inside his head. _Don’t think good old Really-Headless Nick would much appreciate that. Might take it out on the short-order cook._

Dean snorted( _whickered,_ the morbid voice piped up. _Like a horse_.)in dour amusement at the mental images that accompanied the thought and redoubled his earlier resolve to cut back on the Vicodin. He bent and scooped up the knife with his injured hand, careful not to curl his fingers too tightly. Pain prickled and sizzled through his nerve endings despite his caution, and he nearly shook his hand in an effort to dispel the needling sensation before common sense intervened. He shut the car door with a quiet _thunk_ and examined the pocketknife as it lay in his bandaged palm. 

It looked oddly organic in his hand, as though he held not a knife of wood and steel, but an insect, its carapace brown and chitinous in his lax, inquisitive grasp. A wood beetle, maybe, or a monstrous palmetto bug that had stowed away in the Impala in warmer climes and condemned itself to a slow, anonymous death beneath the front seat, frozen and blind amid loose change and the alien, wax-paper tumbleweeds of old fast food wrappers. He switched hands and gave the knife an experimental squeeze, lips pursed in unconscious anticipation of a stealthy, cellophane crackle. The only sound was the whisper of dry, cool flesh swallowing smooth wood. 

No bug. Just a pocketknife given to him when he was ten years old by a man he revered but could seldom remember, a scrap of family history that slept in his back pocket and absorbed the smells of sun-faded denim and well-oiled leather and the last gasps of his three-burrito lunch as it slipped through his boxers and into eternity. He relaxed his fingers and released a shuddering, too-dry breath. 

“That’s enough of _that_ shit,” he announced to no one in particular, but he didn’t return the pocketknife to his back pocket as he’d intended. He held it in his loosely-closed fist and gave the passenger door of the Impala an encouraging pat. “I think I’ll stick to booze from now on.” 

The car ticked sedately at him. 

“Damn straight,” he told the car. “As soon as I’m out of the shower, Daddy’s taking you to the car wash.” Sam had done his best to clean up the mess, but he’d done an imperfect job in the dark, and Dean’s discerning eye could detect several stipples and smears of dried blood on the upholstery. Most of it was on the driver’s side, but a particularly audacious smear made the passenger seat look like it had a split lip. 

He turned and retreated to the motel room. It was cold and still inside. The balky heater had belched and hissed until dawn, when it had lapsed into stony, ungracious silence, and Sam’s bed had been empty when Dean woke, the sheets rumpled and the coverlet pulled back like a flap of exposed skin. The sheets had been cold and unpleasantly damp when Dean had touched them, as though they’d been empty a while, and when Dean had raised his fingers to his face to scratch the underside of his nose, he’d detected a bitter, acrid odor, rancid vinegar and burning leaves. It had been a discomfitingly familiar scent, one he’d been reluctant to acknowledge, and so he’d quickly dropped his hand and staggered into the bathroom to wipe Morpheus’ dreaming sand from his irritated eyes and take a piss. Then he’d splashed cold water on his face and come out here to assess the damage and pick up the pieces left by his waking nightmare. 

He wasn’t sure how long Sam had been gone. He had hazy recollections of Sam chivvying him into bed, but the Vicodin and blood loss had knocked him cold, and most of last night was a blissful blank. Maybe Sam had turned off the heater this morning on his way out. Sammy was a goddamned heat sink, a hairless Sasquatch with the maddening ability to stay warm no matter how cold it got, and therefore had little use for geriatric wall heaters. Dean, on the other hand, could gladly sleep in a greenhouse. Maybe Sam had turned it off in an act of fraternal sadism on his way into the square for breakfast. 

_That’d be a nice story,_ grunted Bobby. _If you believed it. But you don’t. The heater quit at dawn. The square is ten minutes out on foot. Even if Boy Scout Sammy stopped off at some gentrified cathouse along the way for a bit of bar babe sunny-side up, he should’ve been back hours ago, shouldering through the door with two cups of coffee balanced in one hand and a greasy to-go bag clenched in his horse teeth. Where’d he go, New York goddamned City?_

_Maybe he decided to head to the local library for some research,_ suggested a stubbornly reasonable voice. 

_Without leaving a note and a bossy list of instructions a foot long about what you could be doing in the meantime? Much as he bitched and moaned about the life of a hunter, he sure as shit wasted no time in clipping the bronze stars to his lapel once you were six feet under and twenty thousand leagues under Lord Hades’ eternal sea. You wouldn’t know the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground, to hear him tell it. It’s like he thinks you left your brains in Hell’s coat check. Besides, he’d’ve taken the car. Einstein still hasn’t gotten it through his thick head that it’s not his car anymore. It’s a wonder he didn’t install GPS and tie a pair of fuzzy dice around the rearview mirror. Or stick a damn hula girl on the dash._

Dean shuddered at the memory of the IPod adapter jutting from the Impala’s vintage radio system like an intrusive, plastic dick. If Sam had been left to his own devices for much longer, there was no telling what horrors his preppy, technogeek mind would’ve imagined for his beautiful girl. He would’ve turned his sleek, sexy road machine and chick magnet into a rolling nerd mobile. The very thought made Dean’s lips curl in disgust. 

_If Sam had been left to his own devices much longer, the fate of your precious car would’ve been the last thing on your mind, because some black-eyed, lippless horror would’ve been leaning over you with your guts in its hands, dangling them over the hellfire until they sizzled and popped like sausages. You’d have been too busy screaming and sucking smoke and your own burning pork fat into your exposed lungs to give two shits about what Sam had done to your car. He could’ve shoved his dick up her tailpipe for all you would’ve cared. Hell, you would’ve been hard-pressed to give a fuck about Sammy, because down in Hell, it isn’t love that conquers; it’s pain and all its ugly promise._

The foggy surface of his mental mirror shimmered with the threat of unwanted memories, breath blown gently over the contents of a whiskey tumbler. It rippled, and in the expanding rings, he caught glimpses of anguished faces and tongueless mouths and dogs with snapping death and foaming, blood-flecked jaws. And Sammy in the instant before his vision had spiraled into black nothingness, pallid and beseeching and _lost,_ clutching him as if the mere determination of his will and the strength in his arms would be enough to wrench him free of Hell’s insatiable, iron grip. Sammy as he’d been Before, before he’d learned that desire and perseverance weren’t always enough to beat the monsters. Sammy before he’d become someone else. 

The ripples drifted lazily outward on the still, silver pond of the mirror glass, opening like an eager mouth and threatening to disgorge his unwanted secrets on the banks in a wriggling, overripe stew. He knew what he’d see if he let the recollections surface, what he’d remember. He wouldn’t just see the anguished faces and the tongueless mouths and the snapping, frothing hounds. He’d hear them, too-the screams, the cries, the glottal snarls. Worse yet, he’d begin to understand them, the phonemes and morphemes of their shared language welling from his blood and coating his tongue like a Communion wafer dipped in sulfur. If he stood here long enough, he’d be able to speak with the voice of the dead. 

He didn’t want to remember any of this, to remember his forgotten tongue, and so he curled his wounded fingers into a fist until the stitches threatened to unspool and loose the ragged mouth a doctor’s needle had so efficiently stopped. The pain rose, a bright and brilliant bubble that lodged in his throat like a pebble. He squeezed harder, invited the crescents of his nails to nip at the white gauze that shielded most of his hand, and the pebble became a burning finger that tickled his throat and bid him scream. He didn’t, though. He clenched his teeth to keep the scream inside and concentrated. 

Eventually, the ripples subsided, and the surface of his mental mirror solidified once more. He exhaled, and it grew opaque, a great cataracted eye in the center of his mind, but beneath the surface, there was no peace. It seethed and roiled, heaved with the need to shatter and send his secret sins into the light to burn and bubble beneath a pitiless sun. He prayed it wouldn’t and hoped that Castiel’s God would grant him that small mercy, because if the mirror broke, so would his mind. The mirror reflected the truths he couldn’t face head on, held them at a safe remove. It mercifully distorted the worst of the memories, blunted their sharp, poisonous edges so that they wouldn’t pierce his mind and let his sanity run out. Sometimes the beer and the dull, sucking heat of a strange cunt were all that tethered him to the strange, new Dean that he had become. They were fragments of the familiar that burrowed and lodged beneath his unfamiliar skin like splinters. When he touched and tasted them, he could almost remember who he’d been so long ago. 

And Sammy. Sammy kept him tethered, too, bound by blood and by a duty he could pass to no one else, not even Bobby, though God knew the old bastard would try, would die trying, as a matter of fact. Sammy was his, his responsibility and his anchor. Sammy kept him going when the beer had gone flat and stale and harsh morning light had shown his midnight dream girls to be women too old for their sleek, young bodies, hard-ridden bimbos with nothing to offer but their sex and hard-bitten cocktail waitresses with too much knowledge behind their makeup-heavy, sleep-puffy eyes. Sammy was there when the bed was cold, the only absolute certainty he’d ever known. 

Except not even Sammy was certain anymore. Sam was so much woodsmoke and wish inside his clothes, a grand illusion Dean could no longer see clearly, and he seemed further and further away every time Dean looked at him. Sometimes Dean would cast a grainy-eyed glance at him over the chipped rim of a diner coffee mug, and Sam would be hazy and indistinct, as though Dean was seeing his reflection in the smudged, greasy glass of the diner window. He’d stare and choke on the swallow of scalding, bitter coffee and blink, and when he did, it would be Sam peering back at him, eyeing him speculatively over the top of his laptop. Just Sam. Wan and older than Dean remembered and simmering with unasked questions, but just his little brother all the same. Dean would swallow the scalding sip of coffee and hide his weak-kneed relief behind a smartass remark and a wad of napkin, and Sam would roll his eyes and huff his bangs out of his eyes and mutter that Dean was going to caffeinate himself into a heart attack. Dean never dignified that with a retort. He just waited until Sam was distracted by the milky glare of Google and closed his eyes in gratitude and prayed that the Sam he remembered was still there when he opened his eyes. 

Sometimes he was, but more often than not, there was someone else in Sam’s clothes, a man of stone and gall, bitter and sullen and hard around the edges. The man wore Sam’s face and used his hands and spoke with his mouth, but he wasn’t his Sam. He was a stranger, a changeling no matter what the reflections in coffee tables and storefront windows said, and the longer he lived inside Sam’s clothes, the more illusory his Sam became, a Sam of woodsmoke and wish and patchwork memories cobbled together from the scant fragments Dean had managed to hoard behind his heart and hide from the demons’ prying, boiling-pitch eyes. 

He switched the pocketknife back to his wounded hand and plodded to the pitiful coffee table that butted the far wall of the motel room with weary obstinacy. It was covered with crumpled napkins and pages from various newspapers. The latter lay limply across the table, pulp and newsprint arms splayed wide to reveal the tawdry secrets of tourist trap life. Atop these, scattered like salt lines to keep the most scandalous tales at bay, were pieces of notebook paper filled with Sam’s painfully neat writing. Though Sam had grown out of the habit shortly after his ninth birthday, Dean imagined Sam writing the lines with his tongue poking from between his teeth in boyish determination. The thought made his chest ache, and his eyes itch. He blew a plosive breath from his nostrils to ease the itch and picked up the nearest piece of paper. 

_3 deaths for certain. Maybe 4? Maggie, Carter, and John for certain. Heads never found. 4th body found alongside severed, denuded head. Unidentified skull sent to NYS crime lab for analysis and positive ID. Local sheriff fairly sure body that of 19-year-old school jock named Trent Walters. Local LEO’s ability to put his underpants on correctly yet to be established, however, so best to focus on three known victims.  
Visit Maggie’s parents first. Parents of only daughter usually more eager to share information._

He let the piece of paper drop to the table and cleared his throat to rid it of the hot, gritty pebble that had suddenly taken up residence there. The notes were typical Sammy, concise, organized, thoughtful, and underscored with his wry contempt for people he considered yokels, which, since his aborted tenure at Stanford, included anyone whose head didn’t come to a point at the crown. 

_Typical Sammy, and yet it ain’t,_ grunted Bobby. _The Sammy of Before never would’ve been so ruthless as to suggest visiting grieving parents first, not without a moue of distaste and an apologetic wince. He’d’ve thought it, of course, and thought it plenty. John taught you psychological warfare right along with your weapons training and your ABCs. He would even have done it when push came to shove, but he would’ve regretted it, and his compassion for the stone-faced, stubbled father and the vague, teary-eyed mother would’ve been sincere when he started plucking at their grief to expose the raw and terrible wound of loss. Loss is an infection, and it spreads outward from the source to weaken everything it touches. Sam of Before would’ve probed it with a surgeon’s fingers and done his best to salve it with some useless platitude before he left. He was always an optimist at heart._

_The Sam that wrote this is the Sam of After, the Sam of nothing to lose and no more apologies to make. The Sam who wrote this would look a grieving mother in the eye and lie without a twinge of guilt. This Sam would not only expose the wound but rip it open to get what he needed and leave a ragged, weeping scar behind. No more gentleness, no more wide-eyed, bleeding-heart pity for the bruised and the broken. Just the ruthless justification of means to an end, and the ghost of Gordon Walker behind his eyes._

_And the woodsman cut open the wolf’s belly and filled it with stones,_ he thought, and in his mind’s eye, Sam ran on all fours, lips pulled back in a lupine snarl, bloody foam glistening on lips grown unnaturally long and preternaturally sharp teeth. His distended belly dragged the ground, and with every stride, the stones that Dean had pressed into his belly with the force of a grief-stricken prayer to a red-eyed angel with no wings on her back and dust on her tongue ground a little more of him into nothingness. Sam ran, and Dean ran after, the pocketknife clutched in his hand as he pursued him to the edge of the river. 

That made him think of Callie Garrison, whose well-meaning father had imprisoned her inside a hell of fairy tales, and of Madison, who hadn’t realized what she was until it was too late, until Sam had already placed his heart in her hands in the hopes that this time would be different, that this time, the roses beneath his hopeful nose wouldn’t curl and blacken at the edges, their perfume gone to stench in his nostrils, that he wouldn’t reach out to stroke the velvety petals and close his hands around a fistful of thorns. Madison had fought the darkness inside her in the end, fought it and lost, and Sam had stood in her kitchen with tears on his cheeks and a smoking gun in his hand. He’d left her there with her brains drying on the same carpet on which he’d loved her hours before, and a few hours later, Dean had sat silently inside the Impala while Sam had heaved his guts and his guilt onto the side of the road, fingers curled tightly around the steering wheel to still their trembling. 

He wondered if he’d been watching a sneak peek of his own future then, if the unknowable wizard behind the smoke and mirrors of his life hadn’t been trying to tell him something, a great and powerful Oz in need of a moment’s amusement or perhaps moved by a fleeting mercy. One day, he might be bent over on the side of some godforsaken road, crying and puking, and bracing his powder-dusted hands on his weak, old-man’s knees so he wouldn’t take a header into the clots and streams of guilt pooled at his feet and splattered over the toes of his boots. He might leave Sam’s brains drying on an anonymous hotel floor, a gun heavy in his hand and cordite in his nostrils like smoke from a guttering fire. Or he might wind up like Gordon Walker, transformed by his obsession into the very monster he most despised. 

Maybe one day had come and gone and he was Madison, confused and frightened and unable to accept the truth that came with each passing mile despite its presence in the periphery of his vision. Maybe he’d go right on denying that Sam wasn’t Sam until there was nothing left of him but his echo in a cruel, yellow-eyed face. Maybe he’d go right on believing it until Castiel or Uriel consumed them both in holy fire. He had no doubt that fire would mark his end. It had marked everything else. For all he knew, there’d been a fire on the hearth the January morning his mother had gone into labor with him. As he’d begun, so would he end, enveloped in the smell of smoke and reduced to ash with the flick of an angelic finger. 

_Or maybe you should stop navel-gazing and get your ass in gear, see what Sam’s gotten himself into._ His father, gruff and unyielding, and Dean saw him, soot smudged on his forehead like warpaint. 

Dean sorted through the jumble of papers until he unearthed his cellphone. He flicked it open with the rough edge of his thumbnail and punched Sam’s speed dial key. He lifted the phone to his ear and listened to its cheerful burr, Jiminy Cricket on a pot buzz and in love with the world. In his other hand, he held his pocketknife, its heft a welcome counterbalance to the lightness of the phone. He stroked the flat of the blade with the callused ball of his thumb, rubbed his unease into his worrystone. 

Three rings, and Dean was sure it would go to the atonal click of Sam’s voicemail, but on the other side of the click came Sam’s voice instead, deep and strangely throaty, as though he’d caught his little brother in the middle of a bong hit. Or in the throes of a good chicken choke. 

“It’s better if you let the chicken breathe, Sammy,” he said brightly. 

Sam snorted. “Shut up, Dean.” 

“Hey, what kind of brother would I be if I didn’t give you these little tips? If it wasn’t for me and my wisdom, you’d still be cribbing glimpses of the promised land from the next door neighbor’s bedroom window and my porno stash.” 

“I never peeped into the neighbor’s window, Dean.” Incredulous and huffily indignant, and Dean knew that if he could see through the phone, Sam’s nostrils would be flared and he’d be wearing an expression of constipated dignity. “In the first place, we never stayed in one place long enough to have neighbors, and in the second, whenever we did stay someplace for more than a few weeks, our neighbors were old relics with false teeth and blue hair.” 

“Well, you are a cougar man, Sammy,” Dean prodded. “Or don’t you remember your girlfriend Gert in Massachusetts? You heartbreaker, you.” 

“Dean,” Sam sputtered, and Dean relished the image of Sam going apoplectic with the effort of trying to send bitchface over the phone. “That was a job, all right? We were there to steal the Hand of Glory. Getting pawed by Miss Havisham was collateral damage.” 

“Aw, you can’t fool me. I saw those sparks flying. Her Polident breath had you going like it was senior-citizen Spanish fly.” 

“Dean…” Dean could _hear_ the cogs grinding in Sam’s head as he searched for a scathing retort, and he relished it, this unexpected return to the _simpatico_ he missed so fiercely. A resigned sigh from Sam. “What do you want, Dean?” 

Dean shrugged even though Sam wasn’t there to see it. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I was just wondering if you hitchhiked to Wyoming for breakfast.” 

Silence and hiss of static on the line. Whispers on the wire. A sussurating scrape as Sam shifted, unseen across the miles. “Oh. Oh, no. I-uh, I just went out for a while. You know, checking on some stuff.” 

And just like that, the present displaced the past with the grating scrape of keys turning in dusty, age-blackened locks. The Sammy of woodsmoke and wish was fading, smothered by the Sam of stone and gall and secrets hidden in clenched fists. 

“What stuff?” Dean demanded. 

More shifting. “Just…stuff, Dean.” Defiant and sullen. 

“Uh huh. That’s great, Sam, that’s real specific. You didn’t think I might want to help with the ‘stuff’?” 

“You needed to rest, Dean. You nearly severed your own fingers last night.” 

Dean bristled. “I did not nearly chop off my own fingers, Sam. I told you, it was-,” 

“What, Dean?” Sam interrupted. “My evil hair?” The contempt was sharp, a pearl of broken glass in a fistful of sand. 

“Dammit, Sam. You’re telling me that out of all the crazy shit we’ve seen-ghosts, demons, werewolves, vampires, crazy chicks coming out of mirrors to kill people-you can’t believe that something might’ve happened with your hair? Well, hot damn, Sam. Why didn’t you tell me Pantene kept the monsters in check? We could’ve wiped ‘em out years ago if we’d just given the world a damn shampoo.” 

“Everyone’s got their limits, Dean, and I draw the line at evil hair.” Sam’s tone returned to the laconic condescension of his adolescence, when he’d made a dangerous game of contradicting whatever Dean or Dad said for the stiff-necked spite of it, citing an obscure fact culled from the hallowed halls of the school library. Dean’s fingers twitched with the prickling urge to cuff him in the back of the head until his arrogance ran from his nose like snot. “Now, if you’ve got some proof, let’s see it. Otherwise…” Sam let the sentence hang between them, unfinished. 

“Otherwise, I’m just your crazy brother who left most of his brains in Hell,” he finished bitterly. “Sorry about that, Sam. Didn’t really have time to pack.” 

“Dean-,” Sam sounded as tired as Dean felt, a man carrying the trials of youth on bones too old for the task. 

“You know what, Sam? Forget it. It doesn’t matter. You’re right. I’m just out of my mind.” 

“Dean.” Plaintive now, soothing, as though he were talking to a spooked horse. “Of course it matters. It’s just-,” Sam sighed as he groped for the right words. “-we’re working this case right now, and until we’ve got more to go on with this other thing-,” 

“You mean your psycho hair?” Dean interjected. 

Another sigh, this one long-suffering, and Dean imagined Sam pinching the pale, smooth skin of his forehead between his thumb and first three fingers in a futile bid to stave off the vicious, burning grip of a migraine. “Yeah, Dean,” he answered. “That. As soon as we’ve got more to go on, we’ll look into it.” 

_That’s Sam for_ ‘I’ll knock you out and ride hard for South Dakota, and when you come to, you’ll be at Bobby’s, tied to the bed with his dirty pocket handkerchiefs,’ Dean thought, and his head felt heavy and too hot, filled with wet sand. 

“Sure, Sam,” he managed, and closed his eyes against a wave of bone-deep weariness. He thought of the Impala again, how inviting her interior had looked as he’d reached for the pocketknife. He was tempted to drive her out of town and park her underneath an old oak tree. The fiery canopy could shield them while he slept and sloughed the bad memories like shed leaves. Instead, he asked, “So, you don’t need any help with your stuff, there, man from U.N.C.L,E.?” 

A brief snort of laughter. “No. No, I’m almost finished up. I’d be done by the time you got here. I’ll just meet you in the square in a couple hours. Maybe we can check out that eatery.” 

“Thrilling,” Dean muttered drily. “I’m gonna head over to the library, see what I can dig up.” 

“You’re volunteering to hit the library?” Sam said dubiously. 

“I watched _Sesame Street,_ too. I got a refresher course, thanks to you. I’m sure I picked up a few things along the way. That was quality programming. Not like Barney. Big, purple douche.” 

“What’s wrong with Barney?” 

“If you have to ask…” Pained. “Besides, I might as well make myself useful. I doubt people are gonna be lining up to place their confidence in a cop who looks like he blew his fingers off with his gun.” 

Sam grunted in acknowledgment of his point. 

“Exactly. So I figured I’d mosey on over to the local institution of culture and higher learning and see what I could find.” 

“’Mosey’?” Sam repeated incredulously. 

“What? I found it in one of those _Reader’s Digest_ vocab busters lying around the clinic waiting room,” he said defensively. “Anyway, even if the books are a bust-and don’t go all Hermione Granger on me, Sammy, sometimes our friend Bernie Book lets us down-there might be some old bird who fancies herself a local historian. Maybe they can fill us in on the lore and all the juicy gossip that wasn’t fit to print.” 

“Right. Affairs. Unsolved murders. Who screwed who out of first prize at the pumpkin-growing contest,” Sam mused. 

“At the very least, there’s bound to be a moldy book of genealogies. Maybe old Ichabod has descendants, legitimate or otherwise. Even a beaky schoolmaster had to get lucky now and then back when having most of your teeth made you a catch.” 

“Actually, the position of schoolmaster or schoolmistress was very well-respected during Colonial times,” Sam pointed out. The world-weary condescension was gone, banished by burgeoning enthusiasm. “The young women were often courted by much wealthier men, and women often saw schoolmasters as desirable husbands, since the position came with considerable community prestige.” 

“My God. You really are Hermione Granger,” Dean replied with mock reverence. “I’m sure you’ll find a horcrux in no time.” Privately, he thought, _This is how he must have been at Stanford, bright and eager to please and ready to wow the world with everything he knew. I bet his hand shot up at every question. Boy probably pulled a Horshack and threatened to fall out of his seat. I bet the slackers in the class hated his guts, but I bet the professors ate him up with a spoon. Bright, polite, driven Samuel Winchester, with enough brains to conquer the world and more than enough drive to rule it._

He opened his mouth, seized with the inexplicable urge to tell Sam he was sorry, but he didn’t know what for, and so he closed it again with the rubbery _plip_ of meeting lips and waited. 

“Shut up, Dean,” Sam said, but it was relaxed, fond. 

“Don’t blame the messenger, Sammy.” He paused to savor Sam’s huff of exasperation. “And hey, if neither the books nor the biddies pan out, there’s always a chance that the librarian is a pretty young thing. Chicks dig war wounds.” 

“You’re unbelievable.” 

“Don’t I know it,” he crowed. “Catch you later, Sammy.” His thumb made to press the END button. 

“Dean, wait,” Sam called urgently. 

“Yeah?” 

“Don’t forget to check the town records for any of the headless horseman’s descendants, too.” 

“Course not. That’d just be sloppy research.” The possibility of old Really Headless sowing familial oats had entirely escaped him. He’d hadn’t thought a guy with a detachable pumpkin for a head would have that many opportunities for a little love by the dashboard light. Then again, desperate times called for desperate measures, and anyway, a bottle of skunky Ripple had made many a good man-or woman, for that matter-wake up next to a disheveled regret. He thought a moment. “Uh, we got a name on Mr. Headless?” 

“Um, not really. One variation of the legend says that he was a Hessian soldier who lost his head in battle.” 

“Well, that ought to be easy to find. We’ll just dig up every German-sounding grave we see until Old Headless goes up in a flash of fire. I’m sure there aren’t many of those around, what with this being Dutch country. We start now, we might hit paydirt by next Halloween. And that’s assuming he’s not pushing up daisies in some unmarked grave behind Farmer Schulz’ outhouse.” 

“It’s not much, Dean, but right now, it’s all we’ve got.” 

“Yeah, well, if we don’t come up with a whole lot more real soon, someone’s going to die.” 

“You think I don’t know that? You’re the one muddying the waters with this talk about sentient hair.” 

“Well, then I guess I’d better quit wasting time and shag ass to the library. I’ll meet you at the eatery when I’m done.” 

He hung up before Sam could extend another useless, fragile olive branch. The tree of peace was beginning to look decidedly bare since the Brothers Winchester had sought sanctuary beneath its boughs, but then, Winchesters had that effect on a lot of things, he’d noticed. He suspected that a Winchester could enter the eternal spring of the Elysian Fields and leave a barren winter wasteland in his wake. 

He sighed and tossed the cellphone onto the table and kneaded his nape with gritty fingers. The pocketknife still rested in his hand, light, yet oddly portentous, a pendulum stilled at the penultimate stroke of midnight. He tipped it into his uninjured hand and flicked it open. 

The blade and hilt were tacky with dried blood, and he scraped the ragged edge of his thumbnail over the former and watched it drift and slough into his palm. 

_Like snowdrifts in Hell,_ he thought grimly, and turned his mind askance before it could retrieve scraps of unpleasant memory from his least favorite scrapbook. There was also, he noted, a single strand of Sam’s hair clinging to the tip of the blade, thick and dark and coarse. 

_Blood and hair,_ he thought. _Dad told me that if I couldn’t save Sam, I’d have to kill him, hunt him down and end him before the other hunters made a gleeful, cruel sport of it in retaliation for his treachery. Salt and burn and bury Sam deep, and for God’s sake, no souvenirs, not even a goddamn lock of hair. Mementos only anchor the dead to the living, and if Sammy was gone, he’d better stay gone, because what came back was seldom what said goodbye. Sometimes, dead is better, said the prophet, and in this line of work, there is no greater truth._

He’d thought the old man was off his ass, whacked out on painkillers and knocked stupid from blood loss. He and Dean had spent their whole lives insulating Sam from the monsters that wanted to devour him like a sweetmeat, and now he was charging him with killing Sam if things went south? It hadn’t computed, and for a long time-until Azazel had spilled the whole dirty truth with a shit-eating grin stretching the thin corners of his borrowed yokel’s mouth, in fact-he’d refused to believe it had really been Dad talking. He’d soothed his unsettled soul with the convenient salve of devilry, that Azazel had been taking Dad’s tongue for a test drive before he’d bought his soul with Dean’s life a few weeks later. 

Even then, he’d balked at the duty laid before him. Demons were filthy liars, and he hadn’t wanted to believe that his Sammy was anything but an all-American goody-goody who wore his heart on his sleeve and thought he could save the world if he just believed hard enough, a Peter Pan who believed in fairies and thought that simple faith would keep the demons in their cages. If there were magic in Sam’s veins, then it was good magic, the magic of a mother and father willing to die for him and a brother who couldn’t tell where Sam ended and he began, or even if there was a divide at all. 

But then Ruby had turned up with her black eyes and blacker truths, vouching for the twisted gospel of Azazel. Dean had stopped his ears against it, but Sam hadn’t. Sam had lapped it up, had believed her stories with an intensity that had resonated in Dean’s bones like a warning. He’d seen something close to greed in Sam’s eyes whenever Ruby came calling with her smirking liar’s mouth, and his heart had dropped into his belly like a cold, wet stone. He’d tried to warn Sam, but Sam hadn’t listened. At first Dean had chalked it up to Sam’s innate stubbornness, but later, he’d realized that Sam hadn’t listened because he hadn’t cared. Sammy had nursed an ego the size of Montana since his first day of school, when he’d toddled among mere mortals and found them wanting, and Ruby’s tales had only fed it. One more person telling him he was the special one, exalted above the ordinary salt and blood of the earth. One more reason for ordinary Dean to be jealous. 

Now Dean found himself walking at the behest of angels, guided through the world by Eeyore in a trenchcoat. Ruby hadn’t been lying, after all, so sorry, and neither had Azazel. Sam really was special, a child of the dark baptized by the blood of fallen angels. The Sam he should’ve been had died in 1984, drowned by a thin rivulet of blood from a damned wrist, and in his place was a changeling. His mouth hadn’t gaped toothlessly in mirrorglass reflections, and he hadn’t drained the life from his mother one eager, suckling kiss at a time, but he was a changeling all the same, and he’d changed the rest of them, too. Their mother had become an angel of ash, risen to heaven on a scream and a tongue of fire, and their father had turned to stone. 

And Dean… He had become his brother’s keeper, a shepherd in Buster Browns still cutting his teeth on Flintstones vitamins. He had forsaken his childhood so Sam could believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and the simple joy of Snoopy. And for twenty-six years, he had considered it an honor and a worthy sacrifice. 

He still did, deep in his guts, but he was no longer certain what he was protecting. The changeling had begun to shift again, realign into a face he no longer trusted. The eyes that looked at him from beneath untidy bangs weren’t the eyes he had died for, hopeful and good and full of a desperate, naïve faith. They were too dark and shadowed, and sometimes in the diffuse firelight of dusk, if Sam looked just so, Dean thought he saw a hint of yellow in them, a long-dormant infection bubbling to the surface at last. He saw it and pretended he didn’t because there were some terrors even he couldn’t face, and with every denial, his father’s voice whispered and writhed in his ear like a turning worm. 

_If you can’t save Sam, Dean, then you have to kill him. There’s no other choice._

Dean bent his head to the knife in his palm, a buck scenting gunpowder on the wind, and sniffed. Blood, sour and metallic, and the faint odor of Sam’s shampoo. There was sweat, too, the desert-sand pungency of skin. And beneath them all was a familiar, yellow stink that turned his belly to lead. He’d smelled it too often since he’d retuned, drifting from Sam and the things he touched like smoke from the smoldering remnants of his nursery. 

He shook his head in vehement denial. “No,” he said flatly. “I am _not_ hunting Sammy. There’s no way in Hell-,” he began, and stopped, because he knew that was a lie. Hell could make a man do anything. “I’m not hunting Sam,” he insisted dully to the empty room. ”Not Sam.” 

The father-voice inside his head stirred restively. _Get rid of that knife, Dean. It’s tainted, just like the jeans._

But that was another order he wasn’t going to follow. It had been easy to leave the dime-store jeans behind; they’d been fragments of someone else’s past plucked from a bin and worn like borrowed skin to cover his shame. The knife was different. It was _his,_ the only thing he’d every truly owned and the only touchstone to a family and a hope he could scarcely recall, obscured as they were by soot and blood. To abandon the pocketknife was to abandon hope, and he was damned if he’d do that. Not yet. Not while his spine was still straight and his mouth remembered the taste of his blood. 

He carried the knife into the bathroom on creaking knees and dropped it into the sink like an offering. Then he filled the basin with holy water and let it soak, watching for the hiss and bubble of cleansed iniquity. At first, there was nothing but the ripple of water and the languid deception of refraction, but then there came a single bubble, rising to the surface like a blown kiss. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing, the product of frayed nerves and pharmaceutical dope, but his bones knew better. 

_Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,_ a wavering voice chanted inside his head, and panic fluttered low in his belly in a knowing, light-fingered caress. 

He swallowed and nodded, and then he undressed in silence. When his clothes were puddled at his feet, he kicked them aside and stepped into the cramped shower, careful to avoid his reflection in the finger-grimed mirror leaning drunkenly above the sink. The water was cold when he turned it on, so cold that it burned, but he didn’t flinch as it sputtered sluggishly from the tap. Cold was a luxury he still relished. He simply bent his head and let the frigid water pelt him like small, hard stones, his plastered hand held out of the pitiful stall like a white flag of surrender.

An hour into his research at the Warner Library, he was a half hour into wondering if he wasn’t hunting Sam, after all. Not the stony, remote Other Sam he had become, but the Sam he had been, all elbows and knees and ragged Converse hightops. Sam had loved libraries as a kid, had wallowed in them with an earnest, often frenetic zeal that Dean had often loudly ridiculed but privately envied. Libraries and their shelves and stacks of books had been Sam’s oases, the clean, well-lighted place of sanity he’d sought for himself when the wealth of his peculiar Winchester madness had simply proven too much. Sam had done most of his growing up with a rifle in one hand and a fistful of rock salt in the other, but most of the scut work of becoming Sam had happened with the gentle, inexorable friction of turning pages. 

Dean guessed he’d been in hundreds of libraries, sometimes as a grudging student, but mostly as Sam’s chaperone before he was old enough to shepherd himself through the vast oak and paper wilderness. Some were stately manor houses lording over sweeping greenswards, Tara for the pocket-protector set, while others were squat, pocked bunkers hunkered resolutely between a coffee shop and a video store and steadfastly overlooked by passersby who would neither notice it nor care until it was shuttered and padlocked and divested of its treasures by bored city workers who carried them out by the arm and boxful and wiped the dust of their fading magic on their coveralls. 

Prince or pauper, they shared certain universalities. The smell, for instance. The fresh-cut pine of paper and the gummy, anise hint of ink and glue. The piquant, oily odor of wood polish. The dusty must of reading chairs and the old people who slumped in them with disheveled newspapers and magazines in their palsied, blue-veined hands. The high, inexplicable tang of felt marker that lurked in the children’s section like the bogey of teachers to come or the ghosts of those recently escaped. The dry, yellow bitterness of chalk. The brittle, papery waft of the librarian, not quite smothered by the meticulously applied layers of makeup and perfume 

Sam had been a child of the stacks, sure-footed and wide-eyed as he’d skipped from one row to the next. Libraries were the one escape their father had never denied Sam. Maybe he’d known that even the hardiest souls needed to be fed now and then, or maybe Dad had simply needed the time to himself, a few precious hours without his son and his soldier underfoot. Either way, Dean had gotten to know libraries and their sedate, voiceless ecosystems as a side effect of being his brother’s keeper, and he’d known as soon as he’d crossed the threshold and seen the sleek, oak-paneled checkout and reference desk that his Sam would’ve loved it here. He’d been tempted to call Sam and invite him to join him after all, but the impulse had died before his hand could fumble in his pocket for the phone. He’d been too afraid of who might be on the other end of the line, and the bitter, rotten-egg stink of sulphur had tickled his nose like dust. 

 

So, he had simply gone to the reference desk and asked the prim, long-faced librarian for access to town histories, genealogies, and land records, as well as books devoted to local lore. She had stared at him in contemplative silence with her faded, print-scarred eyes, her coral-painted lips quirked in a moue of dismay. No doubt she had been cataloguing his bandaged hand and stubbled face and raw, bruised eyes. He had flashed her a patented Winchester grin to show her that he was just a good old boy looking to better himself through books, but she had passed from summer into autumn long ago and thus had proven unmoved by his rakish charms. She’d simply continued to stare at him, hands pressed to the counter. The fingers of one curled beneath the countertop, and he had wondered if the Warner library was equipped with a silent alarm with which to summon the police. 

Finally, the weathered fingers had reappeared. “You look like hell, boy,” the librarian had declared in a gravelly, smoker’s rasp. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he’d answered simply. He’d been too shocked by her unexpected profanity to say anything else. 

“Wash your hands in that bathroom over there,” she’d ordered brusquely, and pointed to a varnished door near the periodicals. “When you come back, if your hands are clean, you get the materials. If they’re not, you don’t. I won’t have you hoodlums vandalizing library property with grimy fingers.” 

He’d wondered what hoodlums she was talking about, but he’d known better than to ask. He’d simply dropped another “Yes, ma’am from his lips like a tendered fine and marched into the bathroom, where he’d washed as hands as best he could with a thin soap that smelled of bleached lemons. Then he’d returned to the circulation desk for inspection, hands held before him like divining rods. She’d peered at his fingers and the crescents of his fingernails and his cuticles and harrumphed, and then she’d disappeared into the warren of shelves behind her desk. 

He must’ve passed muster, because he now sat at a table in the reserve section, the requested materials spread before him in piles of paper and yellowing books that sloughed dust like pollen that coated his fingers and stuck to his freshly-scrubbed fingers. 

“So much for clean hands,” he muttered under his breath. The librarian, who kept a watchful eye on him from her tidy eyrie at the reception desk, narrowed her eyes. He offered her a jaunty wave and a grin. _Hope like hell it isn’t librarian gris gris dust, or I might be reading my next book with my fingers._

He returned to his work and lost himself to the rhythm of the search. He scoured the record books for any mention of a Hessian soldier who’d come to Tarrytown and perhaps put down roots. He checked graveyard registries in search of German surnames and recorded the likeliest candidates. There were surprisingly few. Most of the people here were of Dutch stock. He scoured titles and marriage licenses, birth and death records in the feeble hope that their sharp-toothed mercenary Jerry had done more than bust heads and sow a few oats. 

He sifted and squinted and jotted, and as he searched, his body relaxed. When Sam was younger, he’d often told him that the sifting and turning of pages was a library’s secret music, the Sandman’s music, and if you listened to it long enough, you’d be carried off to Nod. Dean’s only response had been to tell him not to let Dad hear him talking like that, didn’t he remember how Dad got at the mention of magic? But Dean had never told Sam that it wasn’t true. It had been a bit of benign childhood magic that Sam could feel beneath his fingertips and clutch in his hands, and Dean hadn’t wanted to tear it from him in the name of preparedness. Besides, in the deepest recesses of his wild boy’s heart, he had believed it, too, so much so that he had sometimes crept to Sam’s side of the rented bedroom they sometimes shared to pilfer his library books. He had absconded with his purloined treasure to his side of the room, where he’d sat on the floor beside the bed and turned each page in search of the magic, waited for a single grain of golden sand to wink at him from the pages. 

Try as he might, he had never found the magic Sam felt within the pages. The pages had been nothing but tree pulp and ink bound to a cardboard spine by a swath of binder’s glue. Maybe he could never find it because Sam was smarter than he was, more attuned to the truths Dean’s teachers had tried vainly to bludgeon into his thick skull. That was the logical explanation, the one he favored when he was cynical and the light was bright and dead, but when it was dark, and there was no insectile hum to drown it out, his heart had whispered that he couldn’t find the magic between the pages because it was Sam’s alone, its meager recompense for delivering him to the lightless, brambly wasteland of the cursed Winchester kingdom, a land ruled by a black knight who blindly followed a pillar of fire with nothing for protection save a Bible and a fistful of rock salt. Sam had always had a knack for finding the white magic in the world, the wardrobes that led to Narnia and the glittering dust of Tinkerbell. Sam had believed in fairies, he had-fairies and pixie dust and the Sandman’s dreaming dust that led sleeping souls to the land of Nod-and his faith had been complete. And Dean had believed in Sam. 

Dean might not have been privy to the magic of the library, but he could be and was lulled by its rhythms. He lost himself in the scrape of chairs and the furtive clack of keys and the whisper of turning pages. Morning sunlight brightened to early afternoon, and afternoon light softened to the soft haziness of crisp, autumn three o'clock. Shadows lengthened and shifted around him in a hypnotic dance and dappled the backs of his hands as he wrote on the legal pad in front of him, so when the shadow fell across his table and cooled the flesh at his nape, he assumed it was the librarian, come to pry her treasures from his grimy clutches, or Sam, called back to the place of his childhood content.

But when he looked up, it was neither the librarian nor Sam who stood there. It was the boy from the closet. He stared at Dean with distant, inscrutable eyes. His lips were dark, thin, slits inside his colorless face, as though he'd been chewing betel. His hands hung slackly at his sides, and watery ichor dripped from his tuberous fingertips onto the creased tops of his sneakers.

_Not ichor,_ Dean thought dispassionately even as his belly tightened with adrenaline and his fingers gripped his pen. _That's black water. He's been on the blackwater river, too. Hell, he probably followed us from that no-tell dive._ On the heels of that unsettling thought came another. _The shadow is too long. Yeah, I'm sitting down and the kid is standing up, but even so, his shadow shouldn't fall over the table. Shadows behave in a certain way no matter how irregular and fluid they may look. If they weren't bound by rules, sundials would never work. I spent most of geometry class trying to figure out of the teacher was wearing a bra, but even I know that._

He thought for a moment. _Christ, I sound like Sam._

He looked from the boy to the shadow which stretched, long and thin, across the table, and a memory stirred.

_The Thin Men. That's what Sammy called the distorted shadows thrown by people, especially at night. He was terrified of them as a sprout, thought they were bogeymen. Dad did, too, until he realized that Sammy's terror was a byproduct of his supercharged toddler's imagination. The old man spent the night sleeping in a chair outside the bedroom with a rock-salt-loaded shotgun across his knees the first night Sammy started screaming about the Thin Men. He'd been caught napping the night Mama died and wasn't about to make the same mistake twice. You spent the night petting Sammy, who shivered and whimpered like a kit cowering beneath the circling shadow of a hawk, and watching your old man doze in his chair. You looked for the Thin Men, too, but the only shadows belonged to the heavy-boned sprawl of your father and the dying elm outside the bedroom window. No shadow bogeys oozed from beneath the bed or dripped from the walls. There was only the night and Sam's rabbity terror. He moaned as he slept, moaned so loudly you thought maybe the Thin Men had pursued him into his dreams, but you never said mum to your old man on that score because your old man believed in every kind of magic but the childhood kind._

_Your father quizzed Sammy about the Thin Men the next morning, but Sammy couldn't shed much light on the subject. Perhaps the bogeys had been banished by the crunchy-sweet panacea of Cap'n Crunch, or maybe his five-year-old mouth simply lacked the ability to give form to the formless. He could only shrug and mumble that the Thin Men lived under the bed and in the corners and sometimes crouched on the ceiling, the better to leer at him with their sticky, treacly mouths. Your father went thunderous with frustration, and no amount of prodding could prompt Sammy to elaborate further._

_It was Bobby who sussed out the truth. While your old man retreated to the security of his journals and newspaper clippings and the failsafe of the local library(and sometimes you wonder if Sam realizes that for all John Winchester denied him, he also introduced him to his first and most undying love), Bobby took Sammy onto the porch with a bottle of Hires and sat down on the porch steps. For all his piss and vinegar, the old fart could be surprisingly gentle. He opened Sammy's bottle with a careless flick of his pocketknife and passed him the bottle, and then he simply waited while Sammy took several desperate gulps. Several of his dogs ambled up to sniff at his boots and the cool bottom of the pop bottle, and he reached out to idly scratch their muzzles with work-roughened hands. When Sammy had drained half the bottle and was heaving and smacking with froth-lipped satisfaction, Bobby had put a hand between Sammy's shoulders and said,_ Tell me about the Thin Men, Sam. Tell me all of it.

_And Sam, who'd cut his teeth on the mantra of 'Trust none but blood', did. He told it all between sips of Hires, and though you snickered into your hand when the truth came out, Bobby didn't. He just ruffled Sam's hair and told him to finish his pop, and then he went inside, the dogs trailing hopefully in his wake, wiry tails swaying like metronomes._

Pretty silly, huh, Sammy being afraid of shadows? _you opined as you stood at the sink, up to your elbows in Dawn and the greasy remains of the breakfast bacon._

_Bobby gave you an appraising, sidelong glance and tugged once on the grease-stained bill of his hat._ Is it?

_You thought he was joking and started to roll your eyes, but then you looked more closely. His eyes were bright, but grave, and there was a flicker of sympathy in them that made your belly drop. You dropped your gaze to the filmy water in the sink and said nothing. Bobby stayed in the kitchen, and his gaze made you feel hot and too small. He didn't leave until you started scrubbing the dishes with the rotting remnants of a Brillo pad, and when he was gone, the relief was so exquisite that you wanted to sob like a little girl. You didn't, though, because even at nine, you knew that crying was for pussies._

_You don't know exactly what Bobby told your father when he came home from the library with ink stains and page dust on his fingers and frustration on his face, but he sighed and let the tension ebb from his shoulders and ruffled Sammy's hair, and you felt better until you caught sight of Bobby. His expression was fond as he watched your father behave like a father for once, but when he looked at Sam, his eyes grew thoughtful, almost wary. He studied Sammy with quiet intensity, as though there were a revelation just beyond his grasp. It cooled your skin and warmed your belly and filled you with the need to shield Sammy from his gaze with your wiry, nine-year-old body. Bobby opened his mouth to speak, but then he shut it again and shook his head and told your father he was going to rebuild that transmission for that blowhard Carter asshole._

_You were glad that Bobby had kept his counsel because you knew words had power. Even a lie could make itself true if given voice, and you suspected that Bobby's words held more power than most. He knew more about monsters and the bitter, poisoned magic that boiled in their misbegotten veins than anyone, had midwifed your father into the lightless world of monsters and shepherded him along its twisting, treacherous backcountry until he could walk alone. Bobby Singer was the downhome, grime-necked sorcerer in a perverse, madcap_ Fantasia. _No brooms marched out of his closets, just racks of shotguns loaded two-by-two with blessed rock salt. If Bobby said something was bad, then it was or soon would be. If Bobby thought there was truth to the Thin Men, then the truth would out eventually, and the Thin Men would come for Sammy when there was no one strong or fast or smart enough to stop them._

_But Bobby hadn't said it. Perhaps mercy had sealed his lips, or maybe he'd understood the power he possessed and feared it as much as you did. So you buried that memory as deep as it would go in the still-fertile soil of your young boy’s heart and let yourself believe that Sammy had been jumping at shadows. Why not? You’d already been asked to believe truths no rational adult could fathom. Compared to the bitter pill of vampires and demons and banshees, Sam’s fear of shadows seemed a comfort, a shred of normalcy amid the madness._

_Every now and then, you wondered, of course. You’re less an idiot than the world knows, but over the years, the loamy soil of your boyhood heart had hardened into the hard, flinty ground of manhood, and when the memory of the Thin Men occasionally surfaced, you called it an issue dead and done and reburied it with a toss of your head and the long, slow burn of whiskey._

_You thought long and hard about the Thin Men when Sam lit out for Stanford with anger in his belly like a stone. You spent the night in the Impala with a bottle of Beam, sprawled in the front seat, the radio blaring hard enough to vibrate the rocker panels and drown the screen-door thunderclap of Sam’s goodbye. You cursed Sam and loved the bottle, and as the night grew longer and the booze settled over your tongue and slowed your heartbeat, your thoughts turned to Sam, who was trundling towards freedom on a bus built for one._

Wonder if the Thin Men found him, _you thought muzzily, and frowned as your stomach did a slow, greasy flip. In your mind’s eye, you saw them following the bus in wisps of smoke while Sam slept, arms folded across his chest and head lolling bonelessly against the window, eyes closed and throat exposed, nostrils open to accept the dirty air and whatever danced in it. It was such a disturbing image that you sat up in the driver’s seat and sloshed Beam down the front of your shirt. Your heart was pounding and your throat was dry and nausea hunkered in the back of your throat like gristle. You wanted to go after Sam, to hunt him down and bring him home before the Thin Men slipped through the glass and devoured him without so much as a burp._

_You almost did, too. You had the keys halfway out of your pocket and were mentally composing the speech you’d give Sam when you found him, and then you remembered Sam’s parting words before he’d shut the door to the Impala and disappeared into the bus terminal without a backward glance._ It’s not all about you, Dean. I don’t need Dad, and I don’t need you. 

_So you returned the keys to your pocket and returned to the cool, comforting cradle of the Impala’s interior. If Sam was so damn sure that he didn’t need you, then he was on his own. You were done wasting your time and your breath on his ungrateful ass. If the Thin men got him, it was no less than he deserved. Sam had his anger, and though you understood it, you had your pride. You soothed it with another swig of Beam and let the music carry you away, and if you wished him well and prayed the bus was faster than the night, it was only a force of habit._

_You almost asked Sam about the Thin Men the night his Jess followed your mother to forever on a spiral of smoke, but he was too white and raw around the eyes and a damn sight younger than his twenty-two years. You knew a man laid bare when you saw one; you’d spent twenty-six years staring into eyes like that at the breakfast table while your father took his coffee and his daily dose of horror. Sam had nothing left to give, and so you let him be. Besides, odds were good that he didn’t even remember the Thin Men, and even if he did, so what? They were nothing but childhood bogeys fashioned from light and its absence. For all you knew, they were rancid leftovers from the night your mother died, fragments of recollection plumbed from his infant’s mind and cobbled into a narrative his toddler’s brain could understand. You thought it a kindness, one of the few you could afford, but now…_

“Are you a Thin Man, boy?” he demanded, and was dismayed at the arid rasp of his voice.

The boy from the closet didn’t reply right away. He merely surveyed him while the darkness dripped from his fingertips onto the floor, his eyes dull and unblinking. Then he said, “I’m here to help.”

“That’s nice, but it doesn’t answer my damn question,” Dean barked, then flinched as he remembered where he was. He darted a furtive glance at Agatha the Hun, sure she was bearing down on him with a ruler in one clawed hand and the wrath of a librarian in her eyes, but the librarian remained at her post behind the circulation desk, thin, sharp nose buried between the pages of a paperback like a hatchet blade.

The boy from the closet followed his gaze. “She can’t hear you,” he said. He voice was tinny and oddly remote. 

To test that theory, Dean picked up one of the heavy, yellowing genealogies he’d been scouring and dropped it spine-first on the wooden table in front of him, where it landed with a heavy, graceless thud that reverberated throughout the silent room and caused the crumbling pages to flutter. It should’ve drawn the attention of the books’ spinster guardian with the immediacy of a rifle shot, but the old biddy never stirred. She just turned the page of her paperback romance and went right on living an imaginary life.

“Let me guess; you’ve set up some kind of creepy-ass privacy curtain between me and the real world because you think you’re gonna dust me in this podunk nerd emporium.”

The boy’s mottled lips twitched, whether in amusement or exasperation, Dean couldn’t tell. His eyes were as flat and lifeless as ever. “I’m here to help,” he repeated implacably. “You’re running out of time. It’s getting stronger. It grew with him.”

“With who?” But then he knew. “Sam.”

The boy nodded, a disturbingly weightless bob on the stem of his narrow, tubular neck. “They’re strong now. Sam’s made them strong since you’ve been gone.”

_Great,_ , Dean thought bitterly. _One more failing to lay at my feet._

“Part of him wants them to be strong. They give him power, make him special. He’s always wanted to be special.”

Dean thought of Sam as a kid, when he’d come bursting jubilantly into cheap motels and dilapidated rentals, report card held aloft like a spoil of war. _Straight As, Dad. I made the honor roll. Bet you can’t beat that, Dean._ Giddy, and more than a trifle smug as he crowed over each mark of perfection and detailed his every academic conquest. Sam had always posted his report cards on the refrigerator door or the hotel room mirror whether Dad liked it or not, and when another card came with the change of seasons to take its place, the deposed scrap of card stock was given a decent buriel in an accordion file that Sam had trundled from place to place. They had been his treasures, as precious to him as rifles and rock salt had been to their father, and he’d treated them with the same reverence. Yes, Sam had been desperate to be special for as long as he’d been breathing, and he’d been so determined to be so that he’d kicked the dust of family from his heels and fled to the land of sweet dreams and the monster-free environs of Stanford in search of his perfectly ordinary special life.

“Who’s making him special?” Dean asked, but he thought he knew the answer to that question, too. It itched and prickled on the tip of his tongue until he spat it out like a clot of poison. “The Thin Men.”

Another fluid nod. Black liquid dripped from his fingertips and spattered the tops of the biy’s bare feet in a fine, stippling mist. “They’ve been with him since the night of the fire. They were a gift from the yellow-eyed man. He dropped them into his mouth one by one like pomegranate seeds. Some died, smothered by your father’s vigilance and your love, but some survived and went to ground until the time was right. It took a long time, because there was a lot of light in Sam’s soul, but they found a foothold when Jess died; maybe they _made_ her die. Her death cracked Sam’s heart in two and let the darkness seep inside like pus from a wound. They feed on hate, on grief, on the things that abcess in a person’s heart. Sam remembered hatred, then, and rage, got drunk on it, and the more he hated and raged against the dying of his light, the stronger they became.”

“You kept them in check for a while with your light, but once you were gone, they were the only strength he thought he had left. They lied to him, promised him the power to avenge you, the power to shape his own destiny and leave hunting behind. They told him he could beat the Devil and reclaim the Eden from which he’d been expelled. Not the same Eden-that one burned to cinders when he was six months old-but a suitable substitute of his own making. He could buy a house and find a woman to stand in Jess’ stead, an Eve drawn from his rib while he labored beneath the lash of his familial obligations. They told him that he could grow children in the soil of a quiet suburb without fear of losing them to monsters. And because that’s what Sam wants more than anything, he believed them.”

“It’s a lie.”

“They won’t help him. They’re part of what he fights. Part of Sam knows, but he’s convinced he can control them.”

“Dammit, Sammy,” Dean muttered. His chest constricted with a mixture of fear and guilt. “Dammit! I never should’ve left him.”

“You hardly had a choice,” the boy observed drily, and Dean wondered when the hollow-eyed waif of the motel room closet had become a stuffy Englishmen.

“I should’ve tried harder. I got taken down by Benji, for Christ’s sake.”

“You still have a chance.”

“How?”

“You have to make him stop feeding them.”

Dean snorted. “Sure. No problem. I’ll just tell Sam to ignore the fact that this job blows.”

“He’s feeding them something else. Something really bad.” The boy shuddered, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

“What?” But he was three-for-three in the rhetorical questions sweepstakes, because as soon as the question left his mouth, he remembered the terrible odor that occasionally wafted from Sa’s skin, the one he refused to name. His stomach knotted and rolled. “No. Uh uh. Samm- Sam wouldn’t do that.”

The boy was unmoved by his denial. “That was before. You have to make him stop, or they’ll win.”

“How do I do that?”

“You have to make him see the truth, see how bad they are.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that, since Sam was in La-La Land when they made their debut last night.”

“Nod,” the boy said.

Dean blinked. “Excuse me?”

“They make him sleep because there’s still enough of your Sam to stop them if he wants to. They have to be secret, until their Sam is strong enough.”

“My Sam, their Sam, this sounds like Jekyll and Hyde.”

_Are you sure what you brought back is really Sam?_ Azazel purred inside his head, lips pulled back from his teeth in an aw-shucks grin and yellow eyes glittering with a gleeful, perverse triumph. 

_Oh, Sam. Oh, Sammy._ Dean’s fingers were slick with sweat and curled so tightly around the edges of the hard library chair that they throbbed and smarted in time with his hammering heart. His bandaged hand wept beneath its gauze, and he suspected that he’d be silencing its plaintive cries with the sewing needle and thread stashed in his duffel and liberal applications of Johnny Walker Red.

“What do I do?” It was a plea, weak and helpless and pathetic, but it was Sam-Sammy-and he didn’t care.

“Make him stop.”

“Yeah, I got that part, but how? It’s kinda hard to have a come-to-Jesus meeting when the guest of honor is having a slumber party with Winken, Blinken, and Nod.”

“Then use the eye that does not sleep.”

“You know, for someone who’s trying to help, you’re really pissing me off.” It was true, but it was also a gambler’s bravado. If the kid from the closet didn’t spill what he knew, Dean was screwed. He was the pragmatist; Sam was the sphinx who savored riddles and mysteries like sweetmeats. Sam was the compass when all the lights went out.

But the boy refused to answer. He just stared at Dean with a watery, inscrutable gaze. The eyes were more sunken than he remembered from their previous encounter in the hotel closet, and Dean wondered if the boy wasn’t spending himself to be here, exchanging a pound of his ectoplasmic flesh for every minute he spent here or every answer to pass from his blue-black lips. Maybe the answer Dean sought was beyond the scope of the boy’s knowledge, or maybe the price was more than the soul of a child could afford.

“C’mon, man. You wanna help? Then help. No more screwing around.”

“Use the eye that does not sleep.”

“Thanks for nothing,” he snarled in disgust. “If that’s the kind of help you’re offering, then I’m not buying. Go back to the village of the damned, where you belong.”

“Watch, Dean! Watch.”

“Tell me this: what happens if I can’t stop Sam.

The boy’s stony gaze abruptly grew sorrowful. “They devour,” he said, and his voice was thick, a gutter clogged with wet leaves and stolen bones. “They devour everything.” His mouth worked convulsively, and Dean thought he was going to say something else, but he retched instead, a clotted, black tide that vomited from his mouth and splattered the table. A gout of the vile liquid soaked the books he’d been perusing, and Dean fought the mad urge to titter.

_No fine’s going to cover that damage,_ he thought nonsensically as the pages absorbed the inky bile.

The droplets from the boy’s fingers became a torrent. The puddle at the boy’s feet became a pool, and Dean knew he was going to die, to drown in the midnight tides before he could scream. The realization should’ve brought panic, but he could only muster a lead-limbed relief that at least it wasn’t death by fire. Death by water was a gentler death than death by flame. The water caressed as it consumed, insinuated itself into mouth, nose, and lungs with the languorous, seductive sway of a lover. It left no marks when its work was done and took no flesh in tribute. The water’s touch left you with a contenred smile.

The caress of fire marked you with a memory of a scream. It raked your nostrils and harrowed your throat and seared your lungs like flank steaks while you screamed and writhed on the spit and the fat from your thighs dripped and sizzled on the flames. The fire consumed you whether you surrendered to it or not. The fire was greedy.

Water was release. Fire was penance.

The black water was up to his calves now, and Dean wondered what Sam would think when he turned up at the library and found him dead. He wondered _how_ Sam would find him, if Sam would saunter inside with his belly full of cheap burger and his head full of ideas and find him slumped in his chair, eyes rolled in their sockets and lips blue and only the faintest trace of dampness on his collar to betray the truth. Or maybe Sam would find him as the boy in the closet had left him, facedown in the black water, surrounded by books and pages loosed from their bindings, as though the books had avenged themselves upon his indifference and drowned him in the ink from their fading pages. He wondered if Sam would appreciate the irony as much as he did.

Up to his chest now and rising inexorably, and Dean noted that the water had no temperature. No buoyancy, either. It was like bobbing in Jello. It sucked at his toes and fingers like starving mouths sucking the last drop of marrow from old chicken bones, and he knew it wouldn’t take long to drown. The mouths would pull him to the bottom, and it would only take a few gummy, slimy mouthfuls of the Jello to stop his lungs. He would be gone between one breath and the next, and with any luck, he would open his eyes to a better eternity than the one he’d left behind.

His heart slowed as it submerged. Dean knew he should fight, should twist and thrash and claw until the muck released its hold. After all, there was Sam to consider. But Sam wasn’t the only one who wanted to be shut of the whole sorry business of hunting; more than once, Dean had kicked himself for being too damn noble to live out what had remained of his life in the djinn’s artificial paradise. He could’ve had his dreams. So what if it was a lie? So was heaven, and Sammy had proven that life inside a lie was quite possible, thank you, with his sojourn at Stanford. For a while, anyway.

Besides, Sam would cope. Dean’s death wouldn’t hurt as much the second time around. It would be old hat, maybe even a relief. Sam could fulfill his grand damn destiny, and Dean could finally sleep. He just hoped Sam had the guts to burn him this time, lest another hand reach inside the soil to wrest him, screaming and bloody, from the womb of the earth. Two lifetimes were enough.

Up to his chin, and Dean watched the boy from the closet as the water lapped at his bottom lip with an eager tongue. His expression was as placid as Dean felt, though he thought he detected a glint of sympathy in eyes that receded further and further into the depths of a skinny, bruised face.

“Devour,” the boy repeated, or tried to. The water throttled it, transformed the word into a series of gargles, the glottal Morse code of the drowned. Dean understood it all the same. The word resonated inside his chest, the delicately-plucked chord of an Aoelian harp. Then, “Watch, Dean. Watch.” The refrain of a familiar tune.

Then the water slipped over his head as neatly as the closing of a drawstring bag. The world was a soothing twilight, a silvery blue-black that reminded him of rendezvous after midnight with the local farmer’s daughter, one hand on a breast and the other curled around the cool neck of a beer bottle or a fifth of bourbon lifted from beneath the nose of a sloe-eyed, drowsy store clerk. If he slitted his eyes and wished himself somewhere else, he could imagine himself in the Impala, rolling down the highway and lulled by the rhythm of the road as the blacktop unspooled beneath the tires. Black on black.

His lungs throbbed, but still he felt only relief. He stared at the boy from the closet, who bobbed a few feet away. He was distorted by the water; his neck bent at an odd angle, as if the force of the water gushing from his mouth had snapped it. The eyes were no longer sunken, but alive and bright and oildrop black. Not a demon’s eyes-the whites were mercifully white, though blue-tinged-but the black of the water. Water dripped from his eyes like tears, and his mouth was open in an endless scream.

_That’s what it looks like when the Thin Men get you,_ , he thought distantly as he relaxed into the ebb and flow of the black water.

And then the water was gone and so was the boy, and he found himself coughing and sputtering in the sepulchral silence of the library, and his heart was hammering inside his chest. His hands shook, and sweat coated his palms and stung his unraveling wounds, but he was bone dry. No black water deep inside his skin or dripping from the ends of his hair. No bitter water in his mouth. Just dust and adrenaline and the dizzying surety that he’d escaped by inches.

He tried to stand, but his knees refused to support him, and he collapsed into the seat again. The groaning wood drew the attention of Agatha the Hun, who closed her romance novel with an authoritative snap and left her rampart to investigate.

“Are you all right?” she demanded as she approached. The question was directed at him, but her eyes were on the books, which lay scattered about the table.

He raised his hand to flap it at her and realized that blood was oozing from beneath the bandages. A drop dangled daintly on the point of his elbow. As he watched, it fell to the floor. _I’m leaking, too. Not water, though. Not yet._

He managed a weak smile. “I’m fine. Just popped my stitches.”

The announcement elicited no sympathy. The librarian’s lips thinned, and she began to gather the books in her spindly arms. “In that case, I’ll take these. I’ll call the paramedics if you like, but you’ll have to wait outside. Blood is a health hazard, and cleaning it up isn’t in my job description.” She hugged the books to her fleshless chest as though to shield it from his unseemly gaze.

“That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” he said, and it was true. His equilibrium had returned, and he stood with a grimace. His hand burned and throbbed, and he curled it into a tight fist to keep more blood from pattering onto the floor.

“Then a good evening to you, sir.” Her goodbye was as thin and bloodless as her lips, and Dean took his leave before she decided he was a dangerous drug addict who needed a remedial D.A.R.E. course with the local sheriff. 

The dark had drawn down by the time he shouldered through the door and staggered outside, and for one stupid, owl-eyed moment, he thought the amniotic world of the Thin Men had been lying in wait, ready to enfold him as he lumbered from the library on numb legs. Then the darkness was broken by the obnoxious, unnatural glow of an arc-sodium streetlamp, and the illusion shattered.

“Jesus,” he muttered thickly. “I must be losing my damn mind.”

He descended the stone steps and crossed the greensward without looking back, wounded hand tucked protectively against his leg to shield it from the sharp, crisp, late-October cold. Leaves and grass crunched beneath his booted feet as he headed for the Impala, and the sound reminded him of grinding teeth. The image disturbed him, and he was glad when his boots found the asphalt. The Impala waited for him beside a parking meter, and the sight of her relaxed him. She was home sweet home, his safe place, the one who kept him one step ahead of the monsters. She would keep him safe while he figured out how to save the center of his universe one more time.

He slipped in to her interior with a grateful, shuddering sigh and let her cradle him for a moment, give him shelter within the memories she carried in every inch of her upholstery, from the smell of his old man to the memory of Sammy’s diapered ass squeaking happily against her leather as he bounced up and down in a fit of hand-clapping toddler’s joy. He could almost smile.

Then the voice of the boy from the closet was in his ear, urgent and hot, and he had no choice but to turn the key in the ignition and pick up his burden again. He pulled out of the parking lot and went in search of the eye that did not sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean lay in the quiet of the hotel room and listened to the silence. He'd thought that the combination of painkillers and exhaustion after his encounter with the boy from the closet would let him sleep, but time had skimmed past midnight long ago, the fingers of a maiden on the cool, still waters of a bottomless pond, and he was awake and alive to the small, sly sounds of nothing. The drip of the faucet in the bathroom. The furtive, rattlesnake hiss of a toilet in desperate need of a new flapper valve. The creak of his bones every time he shifted beneath the sweat-stiffened bedclothes. The rasp and rattle of his breath into his resurrected lungs. The electric, insectile buzz of the miniature camera he'd hidden inside the motel alarm clock. The sounds of Sam in the next bed.

Or rather, the absence of sound from the next bed. Oh, Sam was in the bed, all right--Dean had looked just be sure and seen the unmistakable ridge of Sam from shoulder to hip beneath the blankets--but there was no corresponding sense of him, no soft whistle of breath or sonorous snore or polite, squeaking fart. No murmur of Sammy dream-speaking, no scrape of nails on night-dry skin or muffled pop of boxer elastic as he peeled his carrot under cover of darkness, his urgently-stroking palm a whetstone hiss in the dark and his cries for women a long time gone muffled by the pillow and his clenched teeth. Sam might have been a block of wood for all the noise he made, and Dean couldn't shake the feeling that he was as awake as he was, awake and waiting for something.

_You know damn well what he's waiting for, Dean_ , his father had rumbled inside his head, gruff and deep as the Impala's idling engine. _Nothing to be gained by lying to yourself, son._

Oh, but there was. There was hope, desperate and fragile and slender as reed, hope and a chance for dreamless sleep, or at least dreams not borne on mountains of bone and rivers of blood and the ever-shifting faces that rose from the pit of his unwanted memories, stretched and screaming as they sloughed and boiled and took shape again. Hope thrived in ignorance, a salve so sweet they called it bliss, and why shouldn't he partake of it now? His kinship with the truth had earned him nothing but a bellyful of brimstone and a recycled body stitched together by an angel on the whim of a God he couldn't see. Dancing with the truth had earned him an exercise in futility and a front-row seat to his family's damnation. He was grateful for neither, and tired, and well past used up, and he had no desire to press the cup of gall to his lips and throw it back because it held yet another bitter truth that the job thought he needed to swallow. He'd fallen out of love with the job a long time ago, and what zest for it that hadn't been ground out of him by hard experience had been burned out of him in Hell's unrelenting crucible. He no longer cared about being a good soldier, the unseen elastic that stretched long and thin and painfully to keep the monsters away. Now, he only wanted sleep and blessed, stupid numbness. 

So maybe he would lie to himself, thank you very much and piss off, Dad, load of help you turned out to be, dead and scattered and unreachable in your eternal rest. Just this once, maybe he'd close his eyes and and turn his head and jab his fingers into his ears and pretend that the boy from the closet was nothing but smoke and mirrors and a stubborn, lingering remnant of his sojourn in the Devil's playroom. Maybe he'd set this burden down and walk away without a backward glance, just roll onto his side and close his eyes and wait for the world to end with a bang and a whisper and a plume of smoke. If he moved again, it would be to get a bottle of Jack and and pack of cigarettes and smoke and drink in the hours before the last one, when the hands of the clock stopped at the hour of none and thought was as vestigial and useless as dreams. He hadn't smoked in years except for the occasional post-coital butt shared with a buxom preacher's daughter, but he doubted death from cancer or cirrhosis would be much of a concern if the Devil erupted from the earth and opened his smoldering hand to set loose his minions upon the earth. Strangling on lumps of carcinogenic lung gristle would probably be a mercy. So maybe he'd just lie here and tell Dad and the boy from the closet to go fuck themselves. Just three little words, and he could close his eyes and drift on the oblivion behind them until the morningstar light of Armageddon illuminated the world and everything in it for the last time and left nothing in its place but the dark waters of its absence, a small, insignificant scar the cosmos would note with curiosity and then forget.

Except that he couldn't, and that knowledge roiled in his belly like sulfur and lye. He was on this road until it ended, bound to it by a destiny that had nothing to do with angels and demons and fiats from On High, a destiny forged in flesh and blood and tempered by the knouted lash of too much hard living in too few years. His destiny wasn't written in the firmament by the hand of God, but in Sam--in his pale skin and long limbs and large, brown eyes, in the too-long bangs he could never seem to tame. Dean gave not a damn for the world, had declared himself shut of it and all its attendant bullshit long before puberty had faded from his voice. Family was all that mattered, the blood and bone and coarse grist of shared histories and shared secrets. Family was the only thing worth dying for, the only thing worth suffering for, and he'd done both, the latter in spades and unending torrents. Once upon a time, family had meant Dad and Sam and the ever-present specter of their mother, who had perched on Dad's stooped shoulders and whispered vengeance in his ears like the prodding voice of conscience. Then Dad had offered blood for blood and delivered himself into Hell, and there had been only Sam.

Sam had always been precious, the last living relic of St. Mary, she who ascended to heaven on a pillar of fire, but he had never been heavy, not for Dean, who had become his brother's keeper three months shy of five years old and borne him from his burning nursery like a delivering angel. And oh, wasn't there irony aplenty in that analogy, enough to surpass the daily FDA requirements and then some, no doubt, but Dean preferred to ignore it if he could since irony tasted so much like blood in the back of his throat. Before his angel in a trenchcoat had borne him up and branded him like a steer for slaughter, he had thought of his mother in that moment, her blonde hair and her soft hands and her disembodied voice floating to him on the cusp of drowsy, cornfed Kansas dreams, her assurance that angels watched over him. He had thought of her as he'd carried his screaming, soot-smeared Sam from the wreckage of their great American dream and staggered for the safety of the Impala, aware of nothing save the terror in his belly and the warmth bundled snugly against his heart. He had thought of her and wondered which angel set mommies on fire in the middle of the night. Now when he thought of that moment, he thought of angels in smoldering trenchcoats and raw, red handprints on his refashioned flesh. Just another gift from the God that kept on giving.

Sam hadn't been heavy that terrible morning when he'd stumbled into the predawn cold of a dying Kansas autumn with smoke in his eyes and fire at his back and the cold slamming into his sleep-warm face like a fist. He should have been; even then, Sammy had enjoyed a meal or three and could put away more breast milk than the laws of physics should allow, but there had been no heft to him as Dean had scissored towards the safety and sanity of the Impala on legs gone dead as driftwood, no millstone weight as he'd shoved him into the backseat and clambered in after him. No weight, just warmth and sound and the erratic, squirming motion of kicking legs and flailing arms. Sound and fury and nothingness. Dean had scuttled to the furthest reaches of the Impala's cavernous backseat and tucked a screaming, hysterical Sammy onto his bony, short-legged lap and waited for his Daddy to come out of the house before the Mommy-burning angel found him, too, and though he'd sat there for minutes gone to years, Sammy had never gained an ounce. He'd remained insubstantial as ash and the thin, cotton blankets in which his mother had wrapped him so many long, dead hours ago, as though an unseen hand had reached into his nursery and scooped him hollow, scattered his invisible insides to the wind like so much pumpkin guts, like Daddy had done just a month before, when he'd sat on the front porch steps and carved a jack-o-lantern with a kitchen knife and the old pocketknife with which he sometimes scraped grease from beneath his nails. Maybe Sammy's invisible guts had been left behind in the billowing ruins of his nursery, buried beneath his charred teddy and the blackened bones of his crib. The thought should have haunted and terrified him, but he'd been insulated by the shock of sudden loss, and so he'd merely huddled in the backseat like a small animal driven to ground and plucked at Sammy's blanket and waited for his father to come out.

Eventually, someone had come out, but it hadn't been his father. Oh, he had looked like his father--the same dark hair and ruddy skin and dark eyes and army-issue windbreaker over a wrinkled undershirt stained with giblet gravy--but there had been soot and blood on his hands and a lost, empty madness in his eyes, and he'd walked too carefully, the way he sometimes did when he'd spent too much time with his buddies down the VFW and come home smelling of 40-weight and yeast. He hadn't sounded like his father, either, all hearty laughter and unquestionable authority, but rusty and brittle, as though something vital had sprung and broken inside his chest. He had been a stranger in his father's skin, flapping drunkenly toward him in his socked feet and flapping army peacoat and reaching for him with those awful, taloned hands and dead eyes. He'd reminded Dean of the zombies he'd seen on a Saturday-afternoon creature feature at friend's house, all dead eyes and stiff limbs and awkward, shambling gait, and it had frightened him on an atavistic level, frightened him so badly that when the Daddy-thing had reached for Sammy, Dean had pressed himself against the door of the Impala and screamed, screamed and screamed and clutched Sammy to his chest, concave, almost-five-year-old chest hunched over Sammy's squalling face like a barbarian shield of flesh and bone. He might have gone on screaming forever, a wild and caged and insane thing, if he hadn't caught traces of his father's aftershave beneath the overpowering reek of smoke and brimstone and burning fat, of burning mother, he would realize years later, and then he would be up and scrabbling in the dark for the cheap hotel wastebasket and trying to puke mutely and blindly so as not to waken Sammy, who slept obliviously beside him in the double bed.

He had smelled it, though, familiar and bracing amid the lunacy, and he'd loosened his rictus grip and surrendered Sammy to his father's outstretched, scalded hands, surrendered Sammy and scuttled forward and buried himself in his father, greenbark and bile and dirty undershirt and denim, and succumbed to the bewilderment, hysteria filling his chest and rising in his throat like vomit. Sammy might have grown lighter, but he had grown heavier, so heavy that the only way for him to breathe had been to cry, to scream and wheeze and sob until he hiccoughed and coughed and choked on confusion and snot. He'd buried his face in layers of his father, in army peacoat and stained undershirt, close enough to the stain that he could smell old skin and giblet gravy and the memory of his mother's turkey that had so distended his belly, and tugged on the smooth, worn fabric of his jeans. His father hadn't said a word; the words had all been pushed out of him by the clawing, oily fingers of smoke, and he'd simply rested his ravaged palm on the back of Dean's sleep-mussed head and spat gobbets of liquid smoke onto the brown, dead grass of their lawn. He had leaned against the Impala with a screaming Sam in the crook of one arm and his dumbstruck son wrapped around one leg and watched his world burn and let his son cry.

It would be one of the few times John Winchester would allow his firstborn son such a luxury. Marines on a mission had little time for children or tears. 

He had clung to his father's leg and watched the firemen tramp across the lawn with hoses and fire axes, watched the strobing lights of their fire engines wash the hard frost in blood over and over again. He'd watched the grim police detectives plod in and out of the house with memo books clutched in chapped hands, and watched paramedics wheel what was left of his mother out of the house in a glorified Hefty bag. He hadn't realized it was his mother then. His innocence had granted him that mercy, at least, and he'd thought that they were clearing bits of kindling from the exposed guts of Sammy's nursery. No one had told him any differently, either, not then, and not later. While his old man had had no reservations about telling him that ghosts and ghouls were as real as the shit-scarfing Rottweiler down the block and twice as dangerous, he refused to tell him that his mother had been shoveled into a plastic bag and rolled away, nothing but ash and teeth and bits of bone and hair. Dean had put the pieces together on his own during an episode of _Dr. Quincy, Medical Examiner_ in some drafty old rental in Penobscot, Maine. Sammy had been down for a nap in the next room, curled on the ugly, afghan throw rug with a stuffed bunny clutched to his chest, and Dr. Quincy had been hot on the trail of a serial arsonist. The first victim had been wheeled out in a plastic body bag, and the pieces had fallen into place as Sam, the good doctor's faithful, dogged assistant had peered into the bag and grimaced. The realization had resounded in his head like the shrill wail of the warped gurney wheel, and he'd watched the scene in morbid fascination. Curiously, he'd felt neither swooning horror nor nauseated terror. The realization had been curiously remote, a science exhibit viewed through thick, one-way glass on a school field trip. He'd watched the rest of episode in stony silence, and when it was over, he'd slipped off the couch and turned off the television set with a rote snap of his wrist and gone into the other room, where Sam gamboled down the bunny trail of dreams with his friend, Peter Cottontail. He'd squatted on his haunches and watched Sam sleep, had held vigil and chewed his dirty cuticles and watched the stuffed bunny's eyes bulge in Sammy's fierce embrace. Sammy had been peaceful, but the bunny, the poor, battered, lop-eared companion of his baby brother's warped childhood, had been terrified, and Dean had felt a pang of sympathy. Eventually, he'd tired of squatting and sat cross-legged on the floor and watched Sam breathe and the bunny stare into the burning abyss. He'd stayed there and thought of anything except that small, plastic bag. When his father had come clumping home from a grueling day of scut work shoveling hot patch to put food on the table until the next hunt and the next way station in the Winchester life, Dean had obediently roused Sammy from his nap and shepherded him upstairs to wash the sleep from his eyes and the grit from his hands and clean up for supper.

And that night, he'd dreamed of black plastic bags full of ash and teeth and bits of bone and hair, of wandering aimlessly through a valley of black plastic bags that shifted and pulsed and tumbled like pebbles and scree down hills and towering mountains of black plastic. Sammy had been with him in the dream, not the sturdy, little-boy Sammy who ran and played and pretended to camp by building a pillow fort with the couch cushions, but the Sammy of six months old, weightless and wriggling and screaming in Dean's arms. Sometimes the falling plastic bag pebbles had burst like malignant, malevolent dandelion spores and coated them in ash and bitter, flaking flecks of flesh and bone, had fallen into his eyes and Sammy's squalling, toothless mouth. Sometimes, there had been so many that it had been like walking through a bilious, grey blizzard, eyes slitted and watering against the blinding swirl of ash and burnt mother and body bent and struggling against an unseen wind that howled his father's name. 

He had walked for hours through the valley of black plastic bags, Sammy shielded from the worst of the raging blow and cradled to his chest, and then his path had been blocked by a bag bigger than the rest, one that had rippled and bulged and clittered with a sound like rolling bones. He would have fled from the bag if he could have done, would have turned tail and fled with his precious burden, but the enormous bag in front of him had blocked the narrow path, and with the queer, lurid prescience of dreams, he'd understood that if he tried to step over it, whatever was in the bag would reach up and pull him inside, perhaps clamp onto his shrunken privates with sucking, greedy plastic-bag hands and yank him down into the bottomless dark. He could not retreat for the plastic bag boulders that had closed ranks behind him. He could only stand before the rippling, rustling bag and pray that the dreadful, rolling bones and chattering teeth never chewed their way out and found the fatter, sweeter meats of trembling boy-leg.

But it wasn't chattering teeth that had torn from the bag in an amniotic, pulsing tangle of fluttering plastic and skin stretched black and tight over yellowing bone, but fingers, fleshless and thin and brittle as a freshly moulted carapace. Fingers that had groped and skittered out of the bag like a wary spider, metatarsals arched and phalanges splayed as they surveyed their environs. And somehow, Dean had known that the fingers could see, though he hadn't understood how or why. A terrible form of Braille, he supposed, a reading of the earth with nerveless, idiot fingers. All that had mattered was that they _could_ see, could see and were searching.

For him, of course, because everyone was the center of their universe in the horizonless cosmos of dreams, and besides, he had recognized the fingers even without their adornments of flesh and sinew and clear nail polish and cheap, eighteen-karat gold wedding band. A boy never forgot his mother's hands, even if his only recollection of them was the feathery brush of them across his forehead just before the lights went out and all the wonderful wild things came out to play. His mother's fingers had clawed out of the bag and come to find him, but they were not the gentle hands he had loved and for which he would secretly long every day of his pitiless, motherless life. They were hard and cruel and loveless, bony nubs whose tenderness had been burned away by the flames that had devoured her whole. They were his mother's fingers, but no longer of the gentle, sweet-smelling woman he had known, and the atavistic instinct of self-preservation had howled that to be touched by those hands was to be touched by monsters. If those fingers found him, it would not be to skate over his forehead in a maternal goodnight caress, but to gouge out his eyes or drive into his brain with the reckless abandon of a lobotomist's needle. They meant to do him harm, and if they succeeded, then they would scuttle over Sammy with lethal, arachnid speed and lodge in his screaming, protesting throat, a pacifier swallowed in the middle of the night while an exhausted daddy slept and a big brother danced around the rowan tree with the wonderful wild things that grinned and sang and carded their shaggy fingers through hair tousled and blond and soft as wheat.

He'd tried to retreat anyway, had hugged a screaming Sammy to his chest and backed up until his blind feet had bumped the soft, flabby border of plastic bags that surrounded him. His heel had snagged in the plastic, and he'd sat down hard atop a bag. Sammy had redoubled his shrill, terrified cries, eyes closed and gummy mouth gaping, and Dean had understood exactly how he felt, had wanted to join him, as a matter of fact, because the bag on which he had so unceremoniously landed had been disturbingly lumpy and buoyant, cysts and tumors and pus enfolded in a leper's cadaverous skin. It had shifted and squirmed beneath him, and he'd wanted to get up, but that would have meant letting go of Sammy, and he would rather drown in a sea of frog guts than leave his baby brother to the mercy of those bags and those steadily-advancing fingers, and so he had scrabbled backwards instead, heels digging for purchase in the crags and crannies formed by the mounded bags. The worn tread of his ragged, dirty sneakers had slipped on the oily plastic and the silt-fine dusting of ash that had fallen like a lazy spring rain, and many of the bags had torn beneath his flailing, clubbing feet.

Like their counterpart upon which he had fallen, the bags that had slipped and tumbled around him had squirmed and writhed and pulsed with a queer, suppurating breath that had reminded him of the snot-clogged kids who lingered like wraiths on the periphery of every municipal playground he'd ever visited and wiped their dripping noses on the grass-stained sleeves of their favorite sweater or hoodie and spread their contagion to the others like a plague upon the innocents. Sounds had whistled and burbled through the rents, an ancient, sussurrating, liquid language that had traveled through his bones and sinew in a skin-crawling, stomach-stirring voice that had reminded him of clogged drains and leaf-choked gutters and made him want to curl in on himself and thrash and scream until sound and sensation disappeared and there was only the surety of Sammy tucked in his arms and against his chest like the last, blessed relic of a saner age, when his only fears had been getting finger paint on his Sunday jeans and getting picked on by the zit-faced sixth-grader who hung out on the playground near their house and flicked the ears of the smaller kids with his thick, trolloc's fingers.

_John,_ they'd crooned with their ragged mouths and flapping, plastic tongues. _Dean. Sammy._ The last had made his mouth dry with terror because there had been such naked longing in it, and he'd tightened his already-bruising grip on Sammy, who'd wriggled and kicked and bowed his tiny back in pained outrage.

He'd wondered, as the fingers had darted towards him, what parts of his mother the other bags held, and now and then, he'd seen a glint of white through the tears in the bags, but he'd been grateful that he could see no more than that. He'd thought that if he had to see his mother's face without its flesh or her innards glistening and boiled like sausages, he might let go, not just of Sammy, but of himself, might just sit in this fairy circle of plastic bags and mother parts and scream and scream, and when he woke in the morning, there would be nothing left of him but blinking, unfocused eyes and a drooling mouth, and his sleepy, bleary-eyed father would shake him until his teeth rattled like castanets and scream into his slack, unresponsive face until he woke up Sammy, who would slip from his bed and pad to his side and set his stuffed bunny on his urine-soaked lap. And the bunny would see what they couldn't with its bulging button eyes and scream right along with him with its black-threaded mouth.

As it was, those scuttling fingers had been bad enough, eager and radiating their poisonous energy as they scrambled over the ash-coated earth and clambered up the pitiful hillock of plastic bags he'd managed to scale with his mindlessly-churning feet. They'd scraped the sole of his sneaker, and the vibration in the sole of his foot had prompted a moan of revulsion.

_Don't let it touch me,_ he'd thought feverishly, and kicked blindly at the fingers that writhed and scraped like grubworms. _Please, God, don't let it touch me._ But God had remained as deaf in his dreams as He'd been to his dying mother's entreaties as her throat had bubbled and blackened and turned to jerky above Sammy's crib, and the fingers had crawled over the scuffed toe of his sneakers and crept up the legs of his jeans. He'd been crying openly then, a low, animal whine in the back of his mouth, misery and disgust and unwilling comprehension of the inevitable. Their touch had been light and dry, the brush of a moth's powdery wing, and his bladder had been a hot, shrunken knot inside his underpants as they had crept over his thigh with stealthy, predatory intent.

From his thigh to his cramping belly to his helplessly-spasming arms to the bootie of Sammy's sunshine-yellow onesie. He understood their intent then, those awful ladyfingers with no lady behind them, and he'd tried to lift Sammy beyond their reach, but he'd been exhausted, and terror and adrenaline had turned his arms to limp, leaden noodles, and though Sammy had weighed no more than than the blankets in which he was so snugly swaddled, Dean could not bear him up as he had done on that night so long ago that would never be distant enough. He could only watch as they'd raced over Sammy's pudgy belly.

Sammy, bless him, had laughed at the contact, a high, piercing squeal of delight that had filled Dean with glee even as the horror of what was happening had coiled around him in a smothering fog. Sammy's mouth had been wide and wet, ripe for invasion, and the fingers had wasted no time. They'd darted inside with the fluid, hallucinatory speed of a millipede. Through the lips and past the gums, look out tummy, here it comes. Dean had felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time, and his belly had lurched mutinously as he'd watched the end of his mother's disembodied finger burrow into his little brother's mouth, the disarticulated end protruding from his lips like a knot of gristle.

Except that the finger hadn't dropped into his belly as the script of the irreverent prayer had demanded. It had lodged in his throat just as Dean had known it would. Sammy's giggles had turned into glottal retching, and after a moment, even that had stopped, and Sammy had gone silent and rigid in his arms. No breath in, no breath out, and he had looked at Dean with wide, beseeching eyes. _Not right, Dean, not right at all._

The laughter had died, and so was Sammy, there on his lap and choking on his dead mother's finger. Dean had tried to help, had fought the numb lassitude in his arms and jammed a finger into Sammy's mouth in a bid to pry the finger out of Sammy's blocked airway, but the ash that had been falling in a gentle drizzle throughout this endless dream had abruptly intensified into a howling maelstrom, ash whipping at his face and blinding his squinting, weeping eyes, and the finger had eluded his fumbling, pincing grasp. When he had managed to grip the nub in a moment of dumb serendipity, it had slipped free just as quickly, had curled away from him and winnowed more deeply into his brother's fruitlessly-gagging mouth, a blowfly larva burrowing into its nest of dead flesh. He'd sworn and redoubled his efforts, tears mingling with the ash in his eyes to form a hellish woad that had blotted out his wavering vision and smeared on his bloodless cheeks, but it had made no difference. Sammy had gone right on choking and dying, and his eyes had gone right on bulging out of their sockets, until they'd been as protuberant as the eyes of his bunny rabbit, and just as lifeless. Sammy had been dead, dead as his mother, who wasn't so dead, after all, and Dean had sat in a rain of ash and held the stiff doll that had been his baby brother and turned his face to the sun he couldn't see and howled. He'd closed his useless eyes and opened his mouth and screamed in terror and frustration and animal loss and waited for the ash to fill his mouth and nose and filter into his lungs and drown him just as surely as that awful ladyfinger had drowned his giggling, brilliant Sammy on his own decomposing air. 

He'd awakened to the darkness of the room he shared with Sammy, breath caught between a sob and a scream. For one wild instant, he'd floundered in bedclothes that had felt like plastic bags, convinced that he needed to get to the nursery, to get to the nursery and wrest the choking finger from Sammy's mouth before the smoke and ash clouded his eyes and left him blundering in the hallway like a blind boy. Then he'd remembered where and when he was and sagged against the lumpy mattress that had been as rented as the house and waited for his heart to stop slamming painfully against his ribcage.

Awareness of his surroundings had done little to assuage the lingering panic of the nightmare, and when he'd been certain that his legs wouldn't fold beneath him and leave him in a puddle of uselessness on the bedroom floor, he'd swung them out of bed and shuffled across the thick, dirty shag carpet to stand beside Sammy's bed. The carpet had been warm and sticky beneath his bare feet, beach sand baking in the humid dusk of a dying summer day, and he'd shifted from foot to foot to dispel the unpleasant sensation. His shadow had stretched long and thin and spidery in the narrow shaft of light thrown by the nightlight in the cramped hallway, and he'd thought for a moment, as he'd stood swaying and scrubbing the sleep from his eyes, of the denuded fingers as they'd scrabbled over ash-coated earth.

The memory had disturbed him, and he'd wanted to reach out and shake Sammy awake, to chivvy him out of the bed and into the safety of the living room, where they could camp out on the couch cushions and sleep in the muted, rheumy light of an old desk lamp of milkglass and tarnished brass. But Sammy had been nestled snugly beneath the ratty covers, thumb corked firmly in his mouth and guardian bunny tucked against his chest. Peaceful in his untroubled slumber, and if Dean had woken him, he would have had a sleepy, confused four-year-old on hands far too young for the responsibility they held, would have frightened him with tales of plastic bags that spoke with their dead mother's burning voice and disembodied fingers that writhed liked maggots across ashen ground. So, he had let Sammy sleep his untroubled sleep and dragged his blankets and pillows onto the floor instead. He'd lain on the floor with the smell of dust and arid beach sand in his nose, and he and the bunny had held vigil until dawn had seeped through the windows and banished the shadows that stretched long and thin and spidery and reminded him of hungry, scuttling fingers with killing poison in their blistered marrow.

In the morning, Sammy had been bright-eyed and cheerful and none the wiser of his brother's night terrors, and when he'd sat on the edge of the bed with the bunny dangling from his fist by one well-worn arm and asked what he was doing sleeping on the floor, Dean had given his best and manliest Dad-shrug and said that the damn mattress was too lumpy. Sammy had giggled at the curse word and threatened to tell Dad, the little good-two-shoes, and then he'd slid out of bed with the languid, boneless grace of the young and raced off to do just that, stolid toddler feet pounding dully on the warped, creaking wood beneath the piebald carpet. Dean had gotten a lecture on do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do and an extra round of chores from Dad, who had put in a brief and haggard appearance in the kitchen before heading off to the job site to shovel hotpatch and the shit with men who sported leather hands and sun-boiled necks. Under normal circumstances, the punishment would have bridled and stung, and Dean would have avenged himself on his smirking little brother at the earliest opportunity, but that morning, he'd been so grateful to see him happy and healthy and playing a one-sided game of hide-and-seek with his forlorn bunny sidekick that he'd just let the matter drop, and by the time he'd finished scrubbing the kitchen floor and he and Sammy had clattered outside and down the crumbling concrete steps to play a more lively version of the game in the tussocky, weed-choked lawn, his fear had seemed distant and inconsequential, a bad bit of dreaming dust to be kicked from his heels as he'd chased a gleefully-screaming Sammy around the bole of an enormous spruce.

He had not thought of that episode of _Quincy_ or the nightmare it had spawned for more than a year, until his old man had taken him on his first salt-and-burn job. He had been nearly ten, plenty old enough, Dad had said, to start learning some of the harder, uglier aspects of the job. Besides, Dad had grunted as he'd lugged duffels of rock salt and gun parts and lighter fluid to the trunk of the Impala and tossed them inside, he needed the help since he'd tweaked his back on the last job.

Dean hadn't wanted to leave Sammy, who'd been anxious and clingy at the prospect of days without Dean to guide him through the chaos and uncertainty of his ever-temporary world, but he'd been excited at the chance to do more than clean guns and scrounge for iron bars at the local dump and load shotguns full of rock salt and flasks full of stolen holy water. It had been his chance to make his father proud and show him that he was big and strong and brave enough to fight the thing that had stolen his mother and his childhood and cast a pall over Sammy, whose unsinkable soul should have burned brighter than the sun and dazzled the world with its brilliance. He'd wanted to prove to himself that he could be the man his father needed him to be, the good soldier who wouldn't tangle in his own feet on the leap from the foxhole. So he'd fought the butterflies in his belly and Sammy's iron grip on the tail of his grubby t-shirt and pulled out of Bobby's ramshackle yard with a mixture of sour-mouthed adrenaline and giddy exhilaration.

It had been all right until the fumes from the gasoline had caught the coyly-beckoning finger of the match as it dropped into the cheap, wooden casket. He had recoiled from the cloud of stench that had wafted from the desecrated coffin, true enough, but his gorge had remained in its moorings, and he hadn't cried out when the furtive yet unflattering light from his father's flashlight had risen like a maleficent moon and illuminated the maggots and worms that had laid claim to the sack of rotten meat and liquefying fat that had once been someone's true love, their clean, well-lighted place. He'd merely grimaced and shielded his offended nose with the crook of his elbow and tried not to think about who they had been when they had walked upon the earth instead of disintegrating beneath it.

_Steady, son,_ his father had commanded gruffly. No arm over his nose. Burning the dead like gruesome midnight candles had been old hat for him by them, and only God knew how much death he'd seen in the rice paddies of Vietnam. He'd stared into the casket with hard, inscrutable eyes and watched the teeming maggots dance like vassals of a miniature moon, match balanced with absurd delicacy between rough, dirt-grimed fingers.

_Yes, sir,_ Dean had managed, eyes watering despite the feeble protection offered by the crook of his arm, and he'd meant, it, but then his father had flicked the match into the flimsy casket, and the hideous conglomeration of plywood and worms and rancid fat and rotting flesh had ignited in a small, fierce mushroom cloud of flame and displaced air, and oh, God, memories he'd never known he had had rushed in to fill the void. A sharp, shrill voice and pounding feet. Too much light in the hallway outside his bedroom, and yet not enough. Grass gone red and dead while men in grey coats flapped aimlessly through the yard like grackles, cawing and clicking and stumping in aimless patterns. Sammy nothingness on his lap and his father's skin usurped by a bogeyman with lifeless eyes and yellow teeth too long for his thin, tight mouth. The squeak of a gurney wheel, the rustle of plastic bags that marched two by two and flanked him as he struggled through a valley of ash. Plastic bags that wriggled and writhed and gave birth to his mother's denuded fingers. Fingers that inched over the earth like grubworms, eyeless and white, but not blind, oh, not blind by half. Fingers that pursued and sought and found, sharper than any Hellhound. Fingers that scuttled and skittered and climbed up his pant legs with the ease and infernal grace of all damned things and burrowed into his baby brother's gaily-giggling, unsuspecting mouth. Sammy, strangling in silence and with eyes as bulging and dead as the bunny he so adored. Ashes in his eyes and sliding down his throat like suffocating sand.

And strangely, an assistant pathologist peering grimly into a bodybag.

He'd reeled from the graveside that burned like a brazier, stomach in knots and head overstuffed with fragments of memory he hadn't remembered picking up. His stomach had done a greasy barrel roll, and he'd lurched, staggered, nearly dropped to his knees in the blanket of dead leaves and turned earth gone damp with sweat and gasoline. Bile in his throat and lapping impossibly at his ears. He'd bent and braced himself on his knees and opened his mouth to gulp the crisp, autumn air, but all he'd gotten was the oily slick of burning fat and gasoline on the roof of his yawning mouth, and the images had only grown more vivid.

His father had torn his gaze from the blazing casket. _Dean,_ he'd barked, sharp as the pop of snapping greenbark, and hurried to where he stood, hacking and panting and resisting the urge to vomit and sob. Later, he would realize that the sharpness in his father's voice was because he'd thought Dean had been possessed by the fleeing spirit, but then, with the acrid stink of smoke in his nose and the surreal vision of fingers that danced and writhed like maggots lodged in his overwhelmed brain like a blastocyst, he had thought he was angry, disappointed that the son he'd trained so diligently had proven so soft, so very un-Winchester.

_'M sorry, Dad,_ he'd managed thickly, and prayed that his apology wouldn't come with a side of half-digested hamburger and chili fries. He'd dug the raw pads of his fingers into the oddly woody fabric of his jeans and concentrated on stilling the peristaltic spasms of his rolling guts. _'M sorry._ His clenching stomach had spasmed again, and he'd belched and blinked his stinging eyes and spat a thick runner of saliva into the leaves between his feet.

His father's hand had settled between his shuddering shoulderblades, warm and heavy as a wet mantle. _It's all right, Dean,_ he'd said, his voice rough with smoke but surprisingly gentle. _It's all right. At least you had brains enough not to retch into the fire._

_I'm not a total stupe, Dad,_ he'd thought, but he'd known better than to express the thought aloud. John Winchester's compassion ran fast and shallow where smartass was concerned, and the same hand that had rested so gently between his shoulders would not hesitate to fetch him a sharp cuff to the back of the head. So he'd coughed and nodded and tightened his grip on his rubbery knees and struggled to regain his composure.

A pat on the back, and then his father had squeezed his nape and ruffled his hair. _It gets easier,_ he'd muttered diffidently, and God, wasn't that a terrible truth to tell your ten-year-old son while he fought not to heave his guts and someone's nana burned like a tallow candle? _You done good, son. It's going to be all right. Now come on. Let's get out of here before the light attracts attention._

Dean had been certain that everything would not, in fact, be all right, not with those terrible snatches of memory rattling in his head like disjointed knuckles, and oh, that had been a simile he could have done without. His pride had given up the fight, and he'd vomited between his feet in a wet splatter, fingers digging into the bony humps of his kneecaps and eyes squeezed shut against the image of skeletal fingers scuttling avidly over dead grass and stiff denim and Sammy's sunshine-yellow onesie.

He'd left a trail of vomit all the way to the Impala, gobbets of puke strewn in his wake like breadcrumbs in case he'd ever wanted to rediscover this dark and terrible wood. He hadn't. He'd only wanted to go back to Bobby's and find Sam and bed down in the old storage room that smelled of old dogs and older motor oil and tell him bedtime stories until the weight of their wonder dragged him into sleep and he snored and buzzed into his bunny's fur and something hot and feral and unnameable loosened inside Dean's chest. He'd stumbled up the gentle slope of the cemetery hill, climbed over the fence, and collapsed into the backseat of the Impala, belly burning with shame and exertion. It had been cool and comforting, and the smooth, black upholstery had smelled like the bomber jacket his father had worn once upon a time, when his mother had been alive and happy and full of Sammy and they'd gone to the bandstand in the park to eat hot dogs and cotton candy and listen to earnest local bands with more fervor than talent and fading nostalgia acts scrounging for crumbs of recognition from the faces clustered around the stage. It had reminded him of a home he could no longer touch.

_You did good, Dean,_ his father had said when they'd been sitting around Bobby's wobbly kitchen table in the gloom of a single forty-watt bulb and clutching cold drinks--Dad a beer and he an RC Cola. _I'm proud of you._ But he hadn't sounded proud; he'd sounded beaten and tired and he'd scrubbed his red, raw eyes with the dry, meaty palms of his hands and slumped at the table as though the weight he carried had been increased by his victory rather than lessened. 

It should have been sweet, the payment of a compliment as rare and precious as a pearl, as sweet as the soda clinging to his lips and mouth in a sugary film, but he'd felt only embarrassment and shame and a weariness that had settled into his eyelids and his joints and the marrow of his bones, and all he'd wanted was to shuffle into the makeshift bedroom he'd shared with Sammy, strip off his filthy clothes and crawl into the haphazard nest of blankets, pillows, and sagging army cots that served as their bed.

He'd drunk a few mouthfuls of soda while his father had nursed his beer, and then he'd asked to be excused. His father had grunted, and Dean had taken it as assent. He'd slipped out of his chair and returned the unfinished bottle of soda to Bobby's clanking, rust-spotted refrigerator and shambled to the bathroom, where he'd removed his dirty, soot-smeared clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag that lay beside the door. He'd shoved them in as far as they would go, face turned from the smell of stale socks and burning leaves and rancid fat, not caring if he ever saw them again. Clothes were a constant casualty of growth spurts and his father's one-man war against the things that went bump in the night, and if his father noticed their absence, he would simply mutter under his breath and scratch irritably at his nape and stop at the nearest thrift store or army-surplus store or Salvation Army post on the way to the next job. He'd closed the bulging laundry bag with a savage jerk of the drawstrings and let it fall to the floor with a world-weary thud. Water on his face and urine in the bowl, and then he'd slapped out the light and shuffled into the bedroom, where Sammy had already been a reassuring lump of sleeping boy beneath the blankets. He'd crawled in beside him, overworked arms and back hot and sprung and throbbing with the sullen promise of morning stiffness. He'd watched him sleep while he'd waited for his thoughts to settle and breathed deeply of Sammy and old dogs and the faintest whiff of fabric softener, flowers and sweet grass and family and infinitely kinder than the smell of damp earth and burning flesh.

But that had been later, years and a hundred thousand miles from home. The morning that his apple-pie Midwestern world had gone up in smoke, he'd clung to his father's leg and buried his nose in his rumpled, gravy-stained undershirt. His father had leaned against the rocker panel of the Impala as if it were the only thing holding him up and answered the questions put to him by the hangdog detective with mud on his shoes and ash in his hair. Dean hadn't listened to the questions, had focused instead on the rumble of his father's stomach beneath his t-shirt and on Sammy's fussiness, his mewls and whimpers and bewildered caws, his strident bleats for attention. Sammy was safe, and Sammy was real, and Sammy needed him. So he'd unwrapped himself from the stony solidity of his father's leg and gripped Sammy's kicking foot. Sammy had hooted and grizzled and grinned toothlessly at him and crammed his chubby fist into his gummy mouth, and Dean had known that Sammy was his, forever and ever, amen. At least until the angels came for him, too.

Eventually, the detective with mud on his shoes and ash in his hair had flipped his notebook closed with the rubbery _plip_ of a dead mouth and shaken Dad's hand and offered him his card and stumped back to his squad car, and he and Dad had piled into the Impala and borne a Sammy with height and breadth but not weight away from the house in which he'd been meant to grow up. The house had receded in the old car's thick-glassed rearview, had shrunk until it was nothing but a speck of dust, and Dean's chest had suddenly been like the Grinch's heart, three sizes too small, and he couldn't breathe, and he couldn't see, and his hands had scrabbled at the doorhandle, and he'd wanted to open the door and hurl himself out onto the asphalt and run back, back to the house and his mother and the rooms where he'd played with G.I. Joes and Hot Wheels and a crummy paddle ball he'd gotten at the state fair just that summer, when the sun had been in his mother's golden hair and the tang of a lemon ice had been on his tongue, to run back to the safest place in the world. But his father had locked the doors in somnambulistic parental force of habit, and the door wouldn't budge, and so he could only twist painfully in his seat and look out the rear window, but the house was already gone, swallowed by a gently-cresting grade. An animal sound had welled in his throat, a primal bay of loss and ruthless dislocation, but then Sammy had squawked from his baby seat, a high, irritable wail, and Dean had straightened and wrestled down the hurt and concentrated on soothing his baby brother. On the slump of his father's shoulders and the back of his head as he rode the flat Kansas highway with his red, raw hands clamped around the steering wheel. On anything but the vertiginous sense of drift, as though he were a balloon that had been loosed from its tether and abandoned to bob and float forever above the earth in the boundless purgatory between heaven and earth.

Sammy had never been too heavy for him. Not when he was six months old and full of colic and battling diaper rash in a house with nothing familiar in it. Dean had been the one to carry him around their aunt's house while he screamed and fretted and railed at the upside-down, inside out world with all the force of his tiny but formidable lungs, had bounced him and rested him against his hip and lugged him in a steady lap across the warped linoleum of their aunt's kitchen. His five-year-old arms had acted as a living swaddle while his father had lost himself to his grief and its attendant obsession, a sling in which Sammy had rested comfortably while Dean had pretended to watch cartoons so that his aunt wouldn't favor him with dewy-eyed glances and talk in whispers about sending him to a cerebral kiddie fiddler with expensive paper on his walls and too much interest in the secrets of a young boy's heart.

He hadn't been too heavy when he was two and rambunctious, all big, winsome eyes and baby teeth as he climbed up Dean's legs and tugged on the grungy hem of his shirt, crying in his small, hopeful voice for him to give him "piggies, Dean! Piggies!", little feet stamping and chubby hands uplifted and imploring. Not too heavy as Dean had sat on the hard motel room bed so that he could clamber up and wrap his arms around Dean's neck and clamp his legs around the scrawny saddle of his lower back and dig his heels into the bony stirrups of his hips. Not too heavy as Dean had galloped around the dingy motel room and made airy whickering noises with his mouth, hands curled beneath Sammy's protruding legs to further ensure that he wouldn't topple headlong to the filthy floor or crack his head on the edge of the nightstand. Not too heavy as Sammy had giggled and crowed, "Faster, Dean, faster," with childish glee and Dean had done his best to keep up with his insatiable, unflagging demands.

He hadn't been too heavy when he was five and Dean was lifting him up so that he could reach the sinks in rest stop bathrooms, arms locked and straining around his waist and hips canted forward to buttress his rump while he wriggled and grunted and reached for the broken soap dispenser and whined that he could do it, Dean, leddim go. Not too heavy as he'd taken his sweet time getting soap into every nook and cranny of his fingers and palms because the lady at the daycare he sporadically attended had told him that was where all those dirty Germans lived. No too heavy as his back had ached and twinged and Sammy had rinsed his hands with the same persnickety care, nor too heavy as he'd used the cheap paper towel equivalent of an alpine forest to dry them. Not too heavy as Dean had set him on his feet and watched him destroy all that painstaking work by touching the grubby, crusted lip of the garbage can as he'd thrown the wadded towels away and grinned proudly at him. _See? Told you I could do it._

_Yeah, Sammy. Good job._ Not too heavy as he'd herded him from the bathroom, tucked close to his body in case some sketchy trucker with a jones for meth and little boys emerged from the squalid gloom of Nowheresville to taste of his baby brother's flesh.

He hadn't been too heavy when he was ten and unconscious from a blow to the head from the ghost that he had never seen coming because it was his first hunt. Dean's heart had dropped into his toes and spilled from his mouth on the anguished syllables of his brother's name. Dean had blasted the bitch responsible in the face with a charge of rock salt, and Sammy's name had tasted of salt and terror on his numb lips. The scrape of his father's shovel on the arid Arizona earth as he'd dug into the grave of a woman long dead, and John Wayne had burst through his James Dean skin. He'd racked the gun for another round and charged towards Sammy's crumpled form, shotgun held in front of him like a bayonet and rage darkening his vision at the edges. 

He wanted to scoop up Sammy right away, but instead he'd stood over him with the shotgun at the ready and bared his teeth in challenge. He had been king of the hill and Sammy his only treasure, and he would have fought forever, would have shot until the salt was spent and clubbed with the gun gone dead and impotent and scratched at the ephemeral, translucent flesh until the bitch wrapped her fingers around his throat and squeezed the life from him with the inexorable crush of her hand. But she could have squeezed until his flesh had begun to cool and bloat and rot beneath her fingers, and she would never have succeeded in wringing the defiance from him. He would have gone down kicking and screaming and taunting the frigid whore to the last. Anything to keep her away from Sammy and give Dad the time he needed to finish the job.

Sammy had been his, his duty and his blood and his bit of sacred earth, and in that moment with his father swearing and grunting and digging like the doomed John Henry of childhood lore, he had known with the simple, brutal clarity of love that he would have died on the spot with the gun smoking in his hands if it meant Sammy could live for one more minute, one more breath.

His old man had been faster on the draw that time, the fastest shovel-slinger in the west, and the ghost had gone up in a blaze of ignominy with a forlorn howl, and Dean had stood his ground, gun steady and eyes dry and heart hammering as he'd watched his mother's death by fire reenacted for the fiftieth time, or perhaps the hundredth. He'd lost count a long time ago, and the sight held no more horrors for him although his mind always turned inexplicably to the memory of a grim-faced coroner's assistant peering into a body bag, sorrow and resolve etched on his face. Ding, dong, the bitch was dead, and he'd still been king of the hill, an insensate Sammy sprawled between his planted feet like a spoil of war.

On his knees in the dirt then, salt and sweat and the greasy kiss of gasoline fumes on his lips. On his knees and hovering over Sammy like an angel of mercy and salvation. Checking for skull fractures and neck injures with quick, frantic palpations of his hands and gritty fingers and praying without being aware of the betrayal of his avowed atheism, begging the God and the angels in whom he absolutely did not believe to let him be whole and sound and his willful, wonderful, obnoxious little brother when he opened his eyes.

_Please, God, let me get the finger out before it chokes him,_ he'd thought, and then wondered where the hell it had come from. Sammy's skull, whole and heavy beneath his hand, and when he'd brushed his unruly bangs from his face, his breath had tickled his palm. Sammy had been alive but undreaming, lost to the darkness until his scrambled brain recovered its scattered faculties and restored service.

He had not been too heavy as Dean had scooped him up and carried him to the fence, or too heavy as he'd manhauled his dead and snoring weight over the ornate, wrought-iron pikes of which too many boneyards were so damn enamored. Not too heavy as Dean had settled him into the backseat and climbed in after, but light and precious as a gift nearly lost. Not too heavy as Dean had wrestled him, semiconscious and muttering slurred apologies, out of the car and up the front steps of the crumbling adobe hovel in which they had been squatting. Not too heavy as Dean had forced him to stay awake for hours by marching him back and forth across the slanted floor of their shared bedroom like a Little-League drunk and letting him loll stupidly against him like a Raggedy Andy doll come to life. Not too heavy as Dean had chivvied him into bed once the danger had passed. Dean had chivvied and tucked and smoothed and stroked Sammy's brow under the pretense of checking for goose eggs, and then he'd spent a long night sitting cross-legged and watching the steady, reassuring rise and fall of Sammy's chest as he'd trod the upward path of sweet dreams, and listening to his father's sonorous, droning snores drifting from the next room like cicada song. In fact, despite his gangly limbs and the large head that had rested improbably on the slender stem of his neck, Sammy had weighed nothing at all, light as a feather in his cradling arms and light as dust over his painfully-throbbing heart.

He hadn't been too heavy when he was fourteen and thrashing wildly in Dean's grip, all thrashing, flailing limbs and gnashing teeth and flashing eyes and furious invective purloined from the mouth of a New York longshoreman. Tears and snot on his face, and he'd twisted in Dean's arms with frightening, unexpected agility and slapped him in the ear hard enough to make it ring with the fuzz-toned feedback of Jimmy Page's guitar.

_Fuck you, Dean._ The shrill, desperate cry of a caged and wounded animal. _Fuck you, and Dad, too._ Not too heavy as he'd strained and bucked against the injustice of one sacrifice too many and vented his rage on Dean because he could, because he'd known that Dean would let him do it, would let him cut and bruise and break until his bile was spent and he was sure his protest had been heard even if Dad had ducked his head and stoppered his ears and refused to listen.

Not too heavy as he ran at Dean with his fists balled at his sides, determined to rail against yet another painful uprooting. Not too heavy as Dean had met the charge with the aplomb of a matador and sidestepped him with a flourish of hand and hip. Not too heavy as Sammy had whirled and leapt at him, unseeing. Not too heavy as Dean had taken him down with a judo toss and straddled him before he could scramble to his feet. Sammy had been big, then, and strong--deceptively so--but the growth spurt that would transform him from average kid to looming Sasquatch had still been a summer hence, and Dean could still fetter him with the weight of his ass and tightly-clamping thighs, could still enforce John Winchester's will by dint of elder brotherhood and unglamorous brute force.

_Liar!_ Sammy had screamed, and bucked beneath him, hands balled into fist and face contorted in effort and fury. _You dirty fucking bush-league liar. You said we could stay until school finished. You promised._ Corded and flailing and no longer seeing him at all, but Dad, who had come home and announced it was time to pick up stakes and chase their monster into the dark. Except it hadn't been Sammy's monster, not then; it had been his burden, a thief that had stolen his childhood and his lazy summer days and his snowball fights in winter wonderlands and his chance to finish a school year in the same place he'd started it. A thief who left him with nothing but empty promises and overflowing boxes and too many treasures left behind in the dust of another goodbye.

_I'm sorry, Sammy. I'm sorry._ Straddling his squirming, wiry bulk and holding him down with the weight of greater years and a son's bitter obedience. Sorrow and guilt in his mouth like ash and resentment in his belly like lye as he pinioned his snarling baby brother's arms above his head to stop the barrage of glancing, blind blows.

_No, you're not, you fucking liar._ High and shrill and wounded, the last defiant cry of an animal that knows it has lost the fight. _You're just like him, and I hate you._

Sammy's spit on his face had been heavier than the taut, bowstring thrum of him beneath his subduing mount. 

_I know, Sammy, I know,_ he'd grunted, heart bruised and lips numb, and ridden the crest of his rage until it was spent and Sammy had been too tired and broken to fight.

Sammy had been heaviest in his absence, in all the things he'd left for Dean to do when he'd packed his bags--ones handed down from Dean, for what little that was worth--and lit out for Stanford on a Greyhound bus. Sammy had crawled and toddled and walked and lumbered in Dean's shadow, had done so even when he'd towered over him, and for all his bluster and bravado and threats to wash his hands of the sordid family business and sink roots into soil untouched by the Winchester taint, Dean had thought he always would, as dependable and eternal as the clean, sleek line of the Impala as she cut through the black waters of night in a throaty, rumbling glide or the determined set of their father's shoulders as he marched onward to another battle in a war without end.

But then Sammy had gone and left nothing behind but anger and the faint cardamom and graphite piquancy of his cologne in the passenger seat of the Impala, and his weightlessness had become the unbearable burden of his absence. The duty of which he'd so rudely and gracelessly divested himself had fallen to Dean, the good little soldier he'd left behind without a backward glance, and Dean had had no choice but to stiffen his back and his neck and carry on, a dray horse so devoted to the task for which he'd been bred that he would rather die in the harness than surrender it. He'd done twice the research and cleaned and carried twice the guns and iron stakes and loaded rock salt into barrel breaches until his fingers pruned and pickled and grew old before their time. He'd hustled twice as many drunks and barroom desperadoes and bedded twice as many hometown honeys and desperate housewives in the search for relevant local lore and coffee-shop gossip. He'd bluffed his way into twice as many grieving widows' homes with half the fake IDs, and when the monsters and bogeys and things that slithered over the earth had made a game of it and left them bruised and torn and bleeding, he'd carried twice their father's weight as he'd dragged him to the car and the squalid, anonymous safety of a seedy motel, where he could stitch and blot and disinfect and ignore the throb in his own heart.

He'd sacrificed for two, had lost Cassie to the job as surely and finally as Sam had lost Jess. Sam's flight to his California dream had crushed his, and instead of scrubbing axle grease from his nail beds and the smells of oil and asphalt from his clothes and skin, he'd washed away blood and brains and rotten flesh and gone to sleep with the reek of blood and shit and bone meal and dead flesh in his nostrils. He'd borne the cutting lash of his father's anger and the long, smoldering burn of his impatience and done it in silence, because as Sammy had said so contemptuously so often in the years before his dramatic exit stage left, he was the good soldier, the good son who followed orders and his father's footsteps.

Sammy had thought he followed because it was all that he wanted. He hadn't understood that Dean followed the path set set before him by their father because it was all that he had. For such a smart kid, Sammy could be stupid like that. So Dean had left Sammy to his lofty condescension and his haughty arrogance and taken his shame as his own and plodded stolidly on in their father's pitiless shadow and swallowed bile to cover the heartache and the loneliness, and if his mouth had occasionally cursed Sammy's faithlessness, his heart had silently wished him well.

There in the motel with the bedsprings digging into his back like fleshless fingers, he listened to the post-nasal drip of the faucet and the cooling-engine _tick_ of the boxy alarm clock, and he flexed the fingers that pillowed his head and wondered just when Sammy had gotten so damn heavy. Sure, he'd filled out some over the years of their estrangement, had covered his lanky frame with lean muscles that spoke of long jogs on the beach and a meaningful relationship with the gym, but the increased bulk couldn't account for the strange, bloated heft of him now whenever they touched, as if the hollows of his bones had been filled with molten lead. Dragging a groggy Sammy to the Impala after a close shave these days was like carrying the burden of Sisyphus, and that knowledge filled him with confusion and a dizzying dread.

Maybe it was him. Maybe the relentless grind of the job had simply worn him to the nubs and then some. Maybe he was simply too damned old and too damned human to bear him up with the strength of angels and heroes anymore. Maybe his time on the rack had stretched his fragile, threadbare soul too thin, had bled it of the grace that had allowed him to carry them both, had bled it from him as gleefully and ruthlessly as he had-

His jaw clenched as noisome, blood-slick memories shifted and pulsed beneath the membranous, eggshell skin of his mind and threatened to erupt with the feverish pustulence of a boil. He had sworn to himself while he'd washed dirt from his hair and spit it into the basin of a gas station sink in the middle of Pontiac, Illigoddamnednois that he would bury those memories as deeply as the would go, bury them and never disturb the earth in which they slept, and he saw no reason to renege on that particular resolution now, especially not in this godforsaken hotel room with his brother pretending to dream in the next bed.

He turned his head to study the vague hump of Sammy in the next bed. Once upon a time, he would have known every line and dip and swell and slope of the body hunched beneath the sheets, would have recognized it with his eyes closed, as Helen Keller had recognized the word _water_ being scratched into her wet palm as she stood over a rusted pump outside a dilapidated clapboard house she could not see. For years, it had been a part of him, a snug knot of little boy curled butt to belly in his bed meant for one but somehow big enough for two, a living, breathing extension of himself that had moved with his muscles and smiled with his mouth and taken up all the room in his heart and left no room for anyone else, and who had dreamed all the dreams he dared not dream.

But something had changed in the four months( _forty years oh god forty years_ )he'd been beneath the earth and an unwilling toy in the Devil's rumpus room; the familiar topography had shifted by scarcely-perceptible degrees and become alien and unknowable and strange. His mind couldn't process the change, couldn't find the fault that niggled beneath his skin like the constant, irascible simmer of nascent hives, but his heart understood it. It was as though he were looking at Sam through someone else's eyes.

_Well, maybe you are,_ his portable Bobby grunted inside his head. _Who the hell knows what that holy rollin' accountant of the Lord used to put you back together again? Maybe he just grabbed a handful of mud and whatever spare parts he had lying around, slapped 'em on, spit some goddamned angel juice in your eye socket, and called it good._

_Jesus, Bobby, thanks a lot,_ Dean thought with a dull pang of nausea, and stifled a groan. A flicker of suppressed memory, quick and sharp as a sliver of glass slipped beneath his nails. Golden hair fanned over the rack in a sheet of spun gold and skin white as ivory and a body too exposed for any kindness to come of it. Not there, not in that pit of endless night, where souls cried out for the release of oblivion and the blood ran in a rushing, red river. The cool, silver needle of the scalpel in his hand and that solid, looming presence behind him, all smug malevolence and silver-tongued encouragement.

_Go on, Dean. It's all right. Just one little prick, and I promise I'll make it all better. All that pain, all that pointless agony, I'll snap my fingers and put it right where it belongs--on that silly, puling little bitch in front of you._

_Oh, I know; she looks so sweet and innocent, Little Miss Sunshine with perfect teeth and bows in her hair and a rather fine set of tits, if I do say so. But do you know what she did, Dean? Contrary to what your insufferable father might have told you, most of the folks who step into my parlor earned their ticket fair and square, and this princess here raided her cancer-ravaged grandmother's medicine cabinet and replaced all her Oxycodone with children's aspirin. Boy, Grandma sure got a nasty surprise when the pain came calling and all she could do was douse the fire in her rotting bones with glorified chalk._

_But that's not the end of it. No, sir. Our princess here has always been a bit of an overachiever. I bet you know the type. Always had to go one better. Anyway, our princess here popped a handful of her ill-gotten gains, sold the rest to her bubble-headed, cock-sucking friends, and hopped into the car to drive her little sister to ballet practice. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess what happened, does it? She nodded off at the wheel and introduced the family car to a telephone pole at sixty miles an hour._

_Oh, that sobered her right up, but it didn't make up for her courage deficiency. She left her little sister in the car to burn to death in her tutu. She staggered out of the car and away from her burning, screaming ballerina and sat down in the middle of the road like the useless meat puppet she was, and that's where the paramedics a bright bystander called found her, sitting in the road with blood on her face and a crack in her skull and ballerina sister a little cinder girl in the wreckage behind her._

_She died in the emergency room. Internal hemorrhage. And then she turned up here. She's fresh from intake, as a matter of fact. Just off the boat, as they said in the old days. Her little charcoal briquet of a sister is in the other place. At least, I think so. Who sends an eight-year-old to Hell, right? Then again, God can be a petty son of a bitch. We've borne the brunt of one of his tantrums for a hundred millennia or so._

_Who knows? Who cares? What matters is that she's here and she deserves to be. She left her little sister to die screaming in agony while she drifted in a blissed-out stupor and died a painless, serene death. You died to save your brother and ended up on my rack for thirty years. If doing the right thing earned you thirty years, then what do you think she deserves? More, surely. More by a long stretch. All I'm asking you to do is give it to her. I'm not a bad man, Dean._ An oily, rich laugh. _Hell, I'm not a man at all. I'm justice, pure and simple, the righter of the scales. All I'm asking you to do is what you've been doing your whole life: the right thing. Go on, Dean. Help me make it right._

The silver needle of the scalpel in his hand. The girl's terrified, ragged breathing and the unintentionally lascivious squirm of her as she'd sensed the pendulum shift above her in her bared skin. Her wide, bulging eyes and the creak of the restraints that bound her at wrist and elbow, hip and ankle. The animal smell of fear and piss and the baser smells of shit and blood. That coaxing, cultured, dangerously reasonable voice in his ear, silky and perversely seductive.

And the image of a little girl burning to death in her pretty, pink tutu while the sky turned to rose and twilight beyond the shattered, crumpled windshield and a steel roof gone convex from the force of the impact.

The fluid descent of that damned scalpel to the flesh of her homecoming queen's face and her madly, desperately bugging eyes. The plump, ripe give of her flesh beneath the blade. The gelatinous glisten of her eyeball as he'd shucked it from its socket-

And he did close his eyes then, slammed then shut with panicky tightness, because he was certainly not going to be thinking about _that_. He gritted his teeth against a spasming wave of nausea and gripped the side of the bed until it passed, and when it did, he rolled onto his side and studied his brother in the imperfect darkness. The flimsy sheets were pulled around Sam's shoulders, and only the unruly mop of his hair was visible, but even so, Dean could see that the slope of his ribs was too steep, the set of his shoulders too broad, the expanse of his back too vast. Looking at him made Dean feel dizzy and sick, as if he'd gone one boilermaker past his limit in some shady pool hall, and stirred the restless nausea in his refurbished guts.

He tried to convince himself that it was a trick of the light, some distortion thrown by the scalding, burnt-umber light of the arc-sodium bulb on the pole in the parking lot, but he knew it for a lie. Sam had changed in some awful, fundamental way that filled him with the despairing, overwhelming impulse to curl in on himself and stopper his ears and bury his face in his knees and rock until the world either righted itself or did him a favor and winked out of the firmament like a blown filament. 

Sometimes, he thought that if he closed his eyes, then he would see it clearly, outlined against the expanse of his brother's pasty skin like a blacklight tattoo. Or in an invisible Braille only his fumbling, roaming, curious fingers could read. But closing his eyes invited the blighted memories in, the smoke and the sulfur and the brimstone and the cold bite of iron and tarnished steel into his taut, sweat-slick skin, and his hands were slick with blood, not all of it his own, and no longer steady, sure, and true. They were no longer innocent, and Sammy, who had, but for one long-forgotten California dream, been handled roughly all his life, deserved better. And so he kept his eyes resolutely open, and the only things his sullied, bloodstained hands touched were soap and the cool neck of a beer bottle and the warm, supple flesh of a woman's breast. 

That Sam had changed couldn't be denied, but the reason for his transformation eluded him.

_Maybe the fact that you spent four months on a rotisserie in Hell had something to do with it,_ Bobby pointed out with his customary nettled pragmatism. _Seeing your brother torn apart by hellhounds has an odd way of changing a man._ In his mind's eye, Dean saw him tug matter-of-factly on the grease-smudged bill of his cap and spit saliva and frustration onto the parched earth of the salvage yard. Brown eyes squinted at him from beneath said grease-smudged bill, worried and affectionate and exasperated at the maddening, short-sighted density that so often afflicted the sons of John and Mary Winchester. It was an expression the old man had worn often over the years, and the familiarity of the expression and the face that wore it made his chest throb with a longing so deep it hurt, crushed his chest in a warm, insistent fist that reminded him of his mother's hands before the fire and its yellow-eyed ringmaster had stripped them of their warm, rosy maternal gloves and transformed them into fleshless, clittering, scabrous horrors( _that tried to choke sammy oh god no mama don't breathe sammy breathe i'm so sorry_ ).

Bobby had a point; grief changed a man, stripped him of his rationality and reason and conscience with the ruthless efficiency of a master butcher at the carving table, pared such lofty, civilized trappings away until all that remained was the raw, unappetizing gristle and marrow of loss and the blind need to fill the bottomless void it left behind. One need only to look at their father to see that. Their mother's death had sent him sailing around the bend on two wheels, and he'd dragged them along with him on his vengeance crusade until it caught up with him on a two-lane stretch of blacktop in Shiloh County and he'd been forced to beg a bargain from the demon he'd spent too much of his ruined, average-Joe life trying to destroy. There was that irony again, strong and bitter as gall.

And hey, it wasn't as if Dean hadn't been a chip off the old block on that score, was it? The minute his frantic, fumbling hand had found the gaping wound in Sammy's back left by Jacob's savage twist of knife, every rule of thumb and warfare his father and Bobby had ever taught him had vanished, swamped by the unthinking, big-brother imperative to make it better, to make Sammy better, to turn the pale, stiff, wooden Pinocchio of his corpse into a real-live boy again like some crazed Gepetto with rock salt and totems and the bargaining chip of a Winchester soul in his ragtag bag of miracles. He'd hadn't just gone to the crossroads, but flown there, ridden the Impala hard as she could go, foot stamped to the floor and hands clamped around the wheel, the leather beneath his palms hard and shuddering like horseflesh at full gallop, stretching and flexing as the road fell beneath her thundering wheels.

He'd gone to that crossroads without a backward glance, had offered up his soul in exchange for a kiss and the chance to see Sammy smile at him, because he would be damned if he would wrap him in a canvas sheet and watch him burn like someone's nana in an Arizona graveyard, desecrated and scattered to the four winds and ground beneath the indifferent heel of a passing fox as it made its appointed rounds in the misty, pre-dawn morning. There had been no thought, no weighing of the scales. It had been an action as instinctive as drawing breath, an autonomic impetus bred into his genes that had driven him into the arms of the enemy to save the best and sweetest part of himself. It was an impulse his father had shared and would have understood. So, apparently, would have his mother.

Instinctive self-sacrifice, it turned out, was as much a family trait as stubbornness, a square jaw, and a fondness for Dutch apple pie. Love and the terrible, yawning anguish it could inspire was the fastest way to lunacy and the shortest road to perdition.

So, yes, Bobby had a point, but it was dulled by the suspicion that Sam's metamorphosis had begun long before Dean had sold himself for one more year of being his brother's keeper and the chance to beat the devil. It hadn't worked out on his end, but Sam had survived, Sam had cried his tears and nursed his grief and gone on, and that was enough; that was worth all the torments of Hell. That was worth the crushing bite of a hellhound's bloody jaws. Or so he had thought, before he'd come back to find this unsettling stranger so at home in his brother's skin.

He suspected that Sam's metamorphosis had begun long before he'd bartered his eternity for twelve months and the slimmest of chances for a happy ending. Maybe it had started at Stanford, beside those cool, still waters that his father's lunatic obsession couldn't reach, or in the warm circle of Jess' arms, there in their rented house that looked so much like the Kansas farmhouse he should not remember. Maybe he'd begun to change the moment he'd stormed out the door of a rented bolthole slumped on the edges of a dying corn field, rage in his eyes and determination in his eyes and goodbye in every long, fierce stride. God knew he'd never seen Sam so furious, so full of affronted righteousness and intent. Sam had made half-hearted noises about leaving before, but that acceptance letter from Stanford had been his golden ticket, and as he'd shaken the letter in their old man's face, it had held within its single thick-stock page the exuberant flutter of wings. Going, going, gone, and the caged bird flees, and Dean had known that Sam was really leaving this time, and that no amount of threatening or pleading would change his mind. He'd never seen Sam that way before, but he'd seen him like that plenty of times since, so maybe the seed had been sown then, sown along with the corn that hemmed them in like the borders of some vast, undiscovered country.

But if pressed, if seized by those pale, skilled, long-fingered hands that had laid him bare and forced to tell the truth by dint of a thousand endless cuts, to tell the truth and please the devil by his shame, he would say that the change had started the night he'd slid into the passenger seat of the Impala and agreed to help him find their wayward father. The Winchester shadow had found his land of milk and honey and soured it all, soured _him_ , and all the weight that Sammy had left behind in the ashes of his gutted nursery had found him again in the ashes of his happily ever after. It had settled over him in a fine mist of ash and an incense of smoke, and flecks of soot had settled over his shoulders like a noxious mantle. Sammy had slumped against the Impala, wordless and haggard and thoroughly used up, and his innocence had been gone, baby, gone, as gone as Sammy had been one late July night, when he'd gathered his courage and his belongs and gone AWOL without a hitch in his step. Dean had secretly envied him then, a tiny speck of jade amid the deep, throbbing red of his hurt and sense of abandonment; he had not harbored such a sweet jealousy that awful, grey October dawn, when Sammy had watched rubber-booted firemen hose what was left of his California dream from the smoldering ceiling of their rented house. There was was nothing to envy in the death of innocence; he'd come to that knowledge long before Hell had sunk its gnarled, burning roots into his captive soul and torn it asunder. He'd learned it at John Winchester's knee at seven years old, staring up at a stubbled jowl and bloodshot eyes and smelling earthbound brimstone on a tongue that told him stories about ghosts and goblins and wendigos and monsters too terrible to name. He'd learned it at his shoulder, watching someone's nana burn in her desecrated grave in the parched Arizona dirt. He'd learned it every time they'd gotten there twelve hours too late to do any damn good. So when Sammy had watched his world burn, there had been no moment of "I told you so" for Dean, no bittersweet flush of ugly vindication, only a dismal sense of failure. The Sammy that had left Stanford to hunt their father had been a snot-nosed, jackass kid with a chapped ass and a mouthful of vinegar and holier-than-thou college-boy condescension. The Sam that had tossed his duffel into the trunk and slid into the passenger seat had been a dark-eyed man, a revenant of his hated father, and though he had needed that fire, that cold killer instinct, Dean had wanted to weep for the sight of it in his brother's grief-ravaged eyes.

That had been the beginning of the metamorphosis, the moment Sam had slipped into his chrysalis and begun the quiet, unremarkable business of becoming someone else, but certainly not the end of it. The change had been gradual and inexorable and subtle as the shifting of sand and the knitting of bones. It had, he suspected now as he watched Sam lie still as death beneath the covers, taken years. Years and hunts and too many damn losses to count.

It was the losses that had changed Sam, he was sure--the loss of innocence(and not all of it had been his own, oh, no; Sammy had watched the wonder drain out of too many children's eyes, replaced by a wariness that had made Dean's bones ache for the familiarity of it. He'd recognized the expression as one that had sat in his own eyes for far too long and seeped into Sammy's when he was eight years old and Dean had explained the sordid home truth of the family business. Sorry, Sammy, Winnie the Pooh is a sham, but the thing under the bed is probably a ghoul, so think about that the next time you dangle your feet over the edge of the bed.), loss of time, of identity, of choice, of hope. And lives, of course. So many lives.

It was the lives that bothered Dean the most, that weighed most heavily on his soul when the night was long and the booze was low and the night's conquest had left nothing but a trace of her perfume and the numbers on the bedside clock oozed toward three a.m. like blood from a wound. He couldn't be sure--the days of knowing Sam like the back of his of hand were gone--but he thought that it was the same for him. Sam had a heart as big as his Sasquatch frame, and he often wore it on the sleeves of his tacky yuppie clothes, much to his detriment. When they were kids, Sam had been the one to pick the fat kids and the brace faces and the broken kids for the scratch baseball games held in the weedy lots of countless anonymous towns. He'd even picked a kid in a wheelchair once, and pushed him doggedly around the rutted paths that served as baselines. Sam's team had gotten pasted, as he recalled, but Sam had merely shrugged and dusted his hands on the legs of his jeans and pointed out that at least everyone had a chance to play. He'd been looking at the handicapped kid when he said it, and Dean had to admit that he'd rarely seen such naked glee on a human face, as though a lost child of the dust had been raised up to feel the warmth of the sun on his face. Sam had favored the kid with one of his sunny grins, and the kid had responded with a million-watt grin in kind and flapped his hand in farewell, fingers splayed in a queerly avian ruffle of feathers. They'd blown out of town a few weeks later and forgotten its name soon after, but Dean doubted that kid had ever forgotten Sam or the day he played baseball with the other kids on some scrubby, weed-choked lot on the outskirts of the dump.

For what it was worth, Dean doubted Sam had forgotten him, either. Because that was Sam. He collected people the way Dean collected cuts and bruises and regrets. People remembered Sam as an angel passing through, with big hands and long legs and soulful brown eyes. Dean was just the dark man at his side, the tired warhorse that kept the Winchester family circus moving. Sam was the one clear detail of a sweet dream you could never quite remember. Dean was just what happened at the edges.

And Sam, for all his pretense to cynicism, still believed in fairness, in angels and mercy and light. Sam had hoofed that handicapped kid around those rutted baselines because he'd thought it was the right thing to do, and because fairness meant give everyone the chance to have a slice of that fabled American pie, no matter how small. Fairness mattered to Sam. Fairness counted, and to Sam, death was the ugliest unfairness of all.

So he took each death, each loss, as a personal affront and a mark of his failure. Winchesters saved people, beat back the monsters with their guns and their stakes and their store of supernatural lore and their unparalleled sets of brass balls, and when the salt and the smoke cleared, the monsters were dead and the people weren't, and they rode into the sunset before the local fuzz made the scene with their badges and their bluster and their ignorance and their impotent weapons. That was the way of it forever and always, or so spake the gospel according to John Winchester. The good guys always won in Sammy's world, and when they didn't, Sammy took it deep and hard and raged, raged against the dying of the night.

And there had been so many useless, unfair deaths. Their mother, caught in a snare laid long before her making and punished for her lack of choice by an agonizing death on a nursery ceiling. Their father, caught in that same milennia-old snare and forced to make an impossible choice. Jess, who'd taken a star turn in a repeat of sordid family history, burned because she had loved Sam. Lila, a young girl whose gift had saved his life and devoured hers in a spongy, malignant, terminal mass that had likely robbed her of everything by the end, including her dignity. Ron, who had faithfully watched for the mutant. He had done his best to help them with his limited knowledge and his good intentions, and he had received a bullet to the head for his pains. Jake and Andy and Anya, whose only crime had been to be a pawn in Azazel's game. Claire, the blushing young virgin who'd died with her cherry intact, screaming as Lilith had flayed her alive. Henriksen, who had held the key to their exoneration and suffered the same fate. Ash, crushed beneath the splintered rubble of the only home he had ever known. Isaac, who had underestimated the threat in a rundown dive in Lincoln, and Tamara, who had died as surely as her husband, even if her body had kept on going. Madison, who met her death at the end of his brother's gun, poisoned by the bite of a werewolf more afraid of loneliness than the monster in his blood.

And Dean himself, of course. That was the big one, the apotheosis of all his failures. Promises bound by blood were the strongest, which was why so much magic relied on the shedding of blood for its potency. Blood was power. Blood was history. Blood was life. Sammy might not have cut his arm and offered his blood to the open mouth of a rune-covered chalice and sworn an oath before Horcus to save him from the torments of Hell, but he had promised Dean, had called to the blood they shared and promised to save him as Dean had saved him. Dean had been his big damn hero, and it had been his chance to return the favor, to be the hand reaching out of the dark.

And he had tried. He had tried so hard, had tried until he was reckless and stupid and dangerous and vulnerable. He had applied every technique he'd ever learned in his city of palms and ivory towers, had trawled the Internet until his eyes burned and watered, fingers flying over the keyboard as he accessed Lexis-Nexis and JSTOR and countless other archives of nerd herd lore. He'd followed every half-baked lead to every crackpot website, had lost two laptops to the viruses he found there, and still, he'd persisted, hunched at the listing hotel table and tapping at the keys with squinting, irritable urgency. He wouldn't have eaten or drunk if Dean hadn't reminded him or forcibly marched him to the nearest greasy spoon for a hamburger or a bowl of dishwater soup, and Sam had gone but grudgingly, as a last small favor to his damned brother. Dean sometimes wondered if Sam had tasted a single bite of those grim last suppers, when he'd stuffed his mouth with greasy wads of meat and bread and bolted them down with scarcely a chew. He doubted it. He suspected that Sam had been too stuffed with the imminence of Dean's death to have room for anything else. Food had been just an irksome necessary evil, a means by which to survive until he found his miracle.

When the Internet failed him, Sam had fled to the dusty, yellowing comfort of his first love--books. He'd pored over the crumbling tomes in Bobby's sagging bookcases and helter-skelter piles, had turned pages fragile and translucent with age and scribbled notes onto a legal pad or tapped them into his laptop. He'd blinked dust and grit from his eyes as he'd searched for the secret to which not even Lucifer's legion was privy, had sometimes bent so close that his nose skimmed the text and his breath riffled the pages with the sound of dead, winter leaves. He'd scoured them all once, twice, and then again, and when they, too, had failed, he'd cast them from him like sloughed iniquities and stood in the middle of Bobby's cluttered living room with his hands fisted at his hips and his head tilted heavenward and tears in his tired, bloodshot eyes, throat working and impotent rage thrumming beneath his skin in a visible ripple.

_I'm going to save you, Dean. I'm not going to let you die,_ he would promise anew, desperate and floundering and running on hope and stubbornness.

_I know you will, Sammy,_ he would reply, and shoot him a false, cocksure grin. _Now stop with the chick-flick moment and bring me a beer._ It was kinder than the truth, and hardly the first white lie he'd ever told his little brother. But maybe he'd slipped in that department, because Sam had always sensed the falsehood, the hollow rot in his reassurances. His shoulders had slumped and his eyes had dimmed, and he'd dutifully shuffled into the kitchen to get Dean's beer, eyes downcast and fists clenched and spirit at the breaking point.

Dean would watch him go without a word, and in his mind's eye, he would see Sammy doggedly pushing a kid in a wheelchair around imaginary base paths, hair in his face and young muscles bunching, the grunting, sweating angel of lost causes and broken people. Sam would return with his beer, eyes wet and jaw clenched against the howl he longed to release, and Dean's chest would throb and swell with a love so bright and fierce that it threatened to turn him into so much white ash inside his clothes. After his sojourn in Hell, he wished it would have done.

Dean had known he was a lost cause the moment he'd sealed his crossroads deal with a dry-lipped, revolted kiss, and a small, ugly part of him had been relieved, glad to be shut of a life he had never wanted and for which he had never asked, but Sam's love for him had been greater than his love for himself, and he had refused to give up, to let Dean lie down and die without a whimper. When the last of Bobby's formidable stacks had been exhausted, rearranged and scattered and strewn over the warped floorboards of the house, Sam had expanded his frantic search to the stacks of any library he found in their travels. From the squat, airless, one-room bunkers of small-town libraries to the stately, granite facades of university libraries presiding over tasteful greenswards, Sam had scoured them all, had haunted their stacks and prowled among the shelves and plumbed their special collections and their reserves. He'd even braved the musty catacombs of the microfiche archives, had buried his head in the clunky, obsolete machine for hours at a time and exposed his swollen, college-boy brain to God knows how much radiation. Dean had tried to talk him out of it, had blustered and sniped and stamped his feet and pointed out that his sacrifice would be worthless if Sam gave himself brain cancer and went facedown into the microfiche, but Sam would not be deterred. In fact, he had redoubled his efforts, and in the end Dean had let him. It was useless and stupid and a waste of energy, but Sam had been tilting at windmills from the minute he'd known to pick up a lance, and sometimes, he'd gotten lucky. He'd had those three years at Stanford, after all.

When his precious libraries had failed him, Sam had slogged on, determined and obstinate and quietly terrified. Dean had seen it in his face on those nights when the light was right and he was too sober to ignore it. The tightness around Sam's eyes and mouth as he'd peered at his laptop screen and willed the answer to materialize. The deepening hollows of his cheeks as he'd chewed on the inside of his mouth in wordless frustration. The way he'd stared at Dean when he'd thought him too absorbed in _Dr. Sexy_ or _Busty Asian Babes_ to notice his scrutiny, longing and mournful and achingly intense, as though he'd been trying to memorize him in exacting detail, from the tiny scar just above his left eyebrow to the dusting of freckles across his cheeks and the narrow bridge of his nose.

As though he'd known he would have to say goodbye.

Sam had always been a stiff-necked bastard, though, and even if the truth had been writ in large, looping strokes in front of him, he'd gone on fighting for the sheer, bloody-minded spite of it. He'd chased every dead-end lead and gossamer hope. He'd even trusted a black-eyed hellbitch in a stolen coed's meatsuit, and when the hour struck none and the hellhounds had come to collect his soul, snapping and snarling and baying for Dean's immortal soul as they crashed into the flimsy double doors behind which Dean had chosen to make his last, feeble stand, Sam had been beside him, useless rifle at the ready because he'd been determined that Dean should not die alone in a house surrounded by possessed suburbanites. 

Sam had been the last thing he'd seen before the curtain came down on his short, brutal life and he woke up in Hell strapped to a table and staring at hands that had been mesmerizing in their loveliness and fathomless in their cruelty, the last voice he'd heard over the baying bloodlust of the hounds and the wet, viscous rending of his fragile human skin. _Dean! Dean!_ Sammy had cried, shrill and bereft and lost, and Dean had wanted to tell him that it was all right, but the hellhounds had punctured the tender bladders of his lungs and robbed him of the power of speech, and anyway, all he could think as he'd slipped down the rabbit hole and into the momentary nothingness of The End was that demons had gotten it right, after all: people really were nothing but breathing meatsuits, semi-intelligent bits of beef that wandered through the universe with only the slightest notion of how insignificant they were and even less respect for the enormity of the gift they'd been given. And of how easily it could be wrested from their greedy, fumbling, ineffectually-grasping fingers. That thought had passed away along with everything else, and when awareness had seeped into him like a blacklight dawn in a room removed from light and time and sanity, he'd found himself at the beginning of a forty-year nightmare and no with amen with which to end it.

_Dean! Dean_ Sam had cried, and rocked him in the cradle of his arms and knees, and even through the triumphant baying of the hounds and the muddy, gurgling onrush of eternity, he'd heard the terror and the despair and the crushing regret. Sam had come to the knowledge of his deepest failure by the pooling of blood in the crooks of his elbows and the crotch of his jeans, and the magnitude of it had shattered his heart and cracked his voice, reduced him to a bewildered child crying for someone to undo the terrible wrong that he had wrought in his reckless naivete. Sammy had tried so hard to be the hero of the day, to return a favor twenty-five years in the making, but in the end, his bravado and mulish pride and hard-earned scholarship book smarts had failed him, and he'd been a fucked-up kid dripping sorrow and snot over the broken, bloody doll that had been his big brother.

The hardest lessons, Sammy had discovered too late, came free of charge.

Maybe the combined weight of his failures had changed him, carved perpetually-downturned grooves into the corners of a mouth that had forgotten how to smile and etched fine cartographer's lines into his forehead and the backs of his massive hands, had left him swaybacked and hollow and broken. Maybe they'd stolen pieces of him in the night while he slept or moved roughly against a girl whose face would never quite come into focus, one hand on the naked swell of her breast and one wrapped around the cold, hard neck of a battle of Jack. Maybe his topography was so different because he'd tried to stitch himself back together without all the pieces, a raggedy man with fraying threads and too little fabric.

_Or maybe it's the Thin Men, Dean. I told you, they devour, and maybe they're gobbling him up a nibble at a time._

The voice of the boy from the closet was close, close enough to lap at his ear like a lover's warm, insidious tongue, but when he snapped his head in the direction from which it had come, he saw only the boxy outcropping of the mounted AC unit and the gauzy, fluttering film of the ugly, utilitarian curtains. No barefoot boy crouching underneath the spindly table and peering at him with an inscrutable, feline stare. No moon-eyed child swallowed by the rickety, creaking chairs. No dark-eyed shade standing behind the belling curve of the drapes. A quick scan of the rest of the room proved equally fruitless. No boy hunkered solemnly at the foot of the bed beside his duffel, and no one squatted on his haunches beneath the scant foliage of their flannels and spare dress shirts. Everything in its place, and nothing out of order.

_Of course not. You salted the doors and windows,_ he reminded himself as he narrowed his eyes and scanned the room again.

_That didn't stop the little bastard in the last fine establishment you gave your custom,_ Bobby noted prosaically. _I don't think it follows the same rules._

Oh, and wasn't _that_ a comforting thought? A spirit that could give a hearty "fuck you" to their few defenses and cross the line in the shag. His life just got better and better. He propped himself on one elbow to survey the floor between the beds, but there was only the vomitous green of the industrial carpet and the stony, twin humps of Sam's sneakers. 

_He could be under the bed,_ suggested the grimly prosaic voice of the hunter inside his head, a voice that sounded like his father and Bobby and Pastor Jim by turns, and in his mind's hellishly acute eye, he saw a pair of pale, spidery, black-nailed hands protruding from beneath the bed( _just like the legs of those jeans I left behind_ )and scrabbling in the coarse, thin nap of the carpet.

Well, if he was, then he could damn well rot under there, because Dean had had his fill of nasty surprises, please and thank you, and he wasn't about to survive forty years in Hell just to pull a Cronenberg and get yanked underneath a crappy hotel mattress and devoured by a child of rage. He carefully avoided looking under the bed and lay down again, head pillowed against his hands.

_He's probably all in your head,_ he told himself, and arched his back until his vertebrae stretched with a perversely satisfying pop and crackle of spine, cellophane and packing peanuts beneath his night-dry skin. _Maybe Sammy's right and this whole thing--the boy in the closet, the sentient hair, that smell you refuse to recognize no matter how familiar it is--is a figment of your warped imagination. Maybe he who raised you from perdition was a C-minus student when it come to human anatomy and he miswired the circuitry of your inferior human brain. Maybe this is just another crazy hallucination meant to drive you to sobbing, face-clawing hysteria. That one was a particular favorite in Satan's funhouse. Hell, maybe I'm still there, strapped to Alistair's table, and my resurrection was just another practical joke, a glimpse of poor-man's heaven before they pull me under again._

Or maybe Sam was right and he'd folded under the pressure of being slammed unceremoniously into a hastily-reconstructed meatsuit that felt alien and too small for all its familiarity when he looked into the mirror. The illusion wasn't perfect, after all; scars he'd carried like merit badges since childhood were gone. In fact, his formerly battered hunter's body was unblemished save for the handprint seared into his left arm. Maybe the cognitive dissonance of being remade had shattered his mind. There was no boy from the closet, no sentient, evil hair. There was only a fractured mind buckling beneath the strain of too much reality, and he was a lunatic locked in a psychotic dream from which he would never emerge.

He rolled onto his side and stared at the bleary, hangdog face of the hotel alarm clock. Thanks to the camera he'd hidden inside, it stared back. They regarded each other in silence, and he wondered what the camera thought as it gazed at him with its lidless, unblinking eye. If it could think, he supposed it would think him a fool, and certainly less entertaining than those entrepreneurial amateur porn directors who availed themselves of its services now and again.

_Least I'm not as boring as those damn Nannycams,_ he consoled himself valiantly. _Bugfuck crazy beats baby barf any day._

A new sound disturbed the stillness, subtle and rhythmic as a metronome, and for an instant, his pulse quickened, but then recognition struck, and he wilted beneath the bedclothes. Sam's feigned slumber had become true, and he was snoring softly. Dean snorted softly, torn between relief and disappointment, and scratched his cheek, stubble coarse beneath the soft pads of his fingers. He grimaced at the strangeness of it and wondered how long it would be before the calluses returned, before he recognized himself in this donated skin.

Sam had the right idea. He should forget about the boy in the closet and the hair that rose from Sam's scalp like liquid strands of night, forget the smell he would not name that wafted from Sam's pores like cheap cologne. He was a hunter, not a shrinking violet imprisoned by his nightmares, and with the return of life had come the return of duty. They were on a hunt for a headless Hessian on a midnight steed, and if he hit the rack now, he could get a few hours' sleep, wake up Sam, and head out for a little surveillance at the covered bridge and apple orchard the ghost was reputed to haunt. Maybe they would get lucky and unearth his unmarked grave beneath the largest and most gnarled tree(because wasn't that the way these stories always went?). It was a longshot, but even Winchesters coaxed a smile from fortune's frigid lips now and then. If so, it would be a quick salt and burn, and they would be gone with the dawn, long before Tarrytown's children shed their skins and became ghoulies and ghosties and wee-leggedy beasties, grinning, chocolate-stuffed, sugar-slathered sweetmeats for Samhain, ignorant of their bliss and of the things that waited for them just beyond the protective circle of the jack-o-lantern's candlelight.

It was a solid plan, and Dean intended to follow it. He leaned precariously over the sagging edge of the bed and groped for the dusty, plastic buttons that erupted from the top of the alarm clock's casing like pimples. The contours of the clock were as intimate and familiar to his tapping, fumbling fingers as the swell of a woman's breasts or the snug, velvet warmth of the Impala's steering wheel beneath his palms. He'd set midnight alarms in the dark so often that he could have done it blindly if need be, have worked his nimble magic blindfolded, guided only by texture and placement, a blind boy learning to see with his fingertips. Clocks were like cars and women: they just needed a little finesse.

_That's right, baby. Work your magic for Daddy,_ he purred inside his head as he toggled buttons and flipped the rough, perky nubs of switches, careful not to inadvertently turn on the radio and jolt Sam from his deep and abiding dreams. _12:00,_ the clock offered meekly, narrow face canted upward as though in search of his approval, and absurdly, he gave it a congratulatory pat.

_Who's your Daddy?_ he thought triumphantly, and promptly wondered when his life had become so pathetic that he delighted in such unremarkable victories.

It was not a question he wanted to ponder at great length, and so he dropped his hand and lay down, cheek pillowed on the steep _V_ of his arm.

_Turn off the camera if you're so done with this evil hair business, boy_ Bobby grunted.

_I can't. Not without fumbling around in its guts, and that's not second nature. Sammy's the nerdy bitch who watched_ Mr. Wizard _as a kid._

_Well, them turn it towards the wall, son. Hell, a chimpanzee could do that much._

He could, and if he really wanted to follow his oh-so-sensible plan, then he should. All he had to do was reach over a second time and put out that lidless eye with a twist of his wrist.

Except he wasn't going to.

_Because you know something's going to happen,_ supplied the boy from the closet.

Yes, he supposed he did. Call it that famed--infamous--Winchester gut.

And damned if Sam didn't nearly show him for a complete tool.

He waited, fought the drooping of his eyelids and the wet-sand heaviness in his limbs, the seductive tug of sleep in the lulling, plucking seesaw rise and fall of his breathing, but nothing happened. No hollow-eyed waif crouched in the closet or at the foot of his bed or peered, wet-eyed, at him from the subterranean kingdom of Underbed. No boy rocked on his heels and opened his mouth and heralded the arrival of the Thin Men with a bilious tide of black water and the warbling, yowling paean to Bastet. No hair rose from the untidy muss of Sam's head to sway and hover like a boneless, black viper. There was only the indelicate drone of Sam's snores and the shuffling scrape of feet passing the flimsy hotel door.

He almost missed it, was nearly asleep when he caught the furtive slither of movement on the periphery of his vision. He froze and blinked the weariness from his eyes, unsure of what he had seen. _It's just a passing shadow from the stewpot traveling salesman two doors down, or maybe some drunken high-schoolers looking for a safe place to neck. Maybe it's just a Halloween prank, some jerkoff kids smearing dog shit and shaving cream on the doorhandles and slipping whoopie cushions against the thresholds. Not everyone's all-American, apple-pie life comes with a side order of maggots._

_Then why are you so afraid to look?_

He exhaled and turned his head, braced for what he knew he would find and begging to be wrong, as wrong as when he'd thought Sam would never leave, as wrong as when he'd thought Hell couldn't break him. He even sent up a silent prayer. If an angel could raise him from perdition, then surely he could grant this one wish of an undead man. It would be but a trifling favor to ask, a bit of quid pro quo from his heavenly recruitment officer.

But his heavenly tax accountant must have had more urgent business, because when he focused his reluctant eyes, he saw the slender, black tendril oozing off Sam's pillow and bridging the narrow gap between his bed and the edge of the nightstand. It did not fall like a length of thread, but simply hovered over the gap, bowed and curled and watchful, a serpent on the hunt. The association was so strong that he half-expected to see the hesitant flicker of a forked tongue or the oily sheen of scales in the dark, but the thick, black strand simply bridged the gap and nosed blindly among the items strewn over the nightstand--a used wetnap from their dinner of greasy hot wings, a pen, a memo pad, a smattering of loose change, the keys to the Impala.

Dean rose on one elbow and watched the hair's progress over the inane topography of the vagabond life in dull-eyed incredulity. He supposed he should do something, should pull some awesome kung-fu master move and pluck the hair from the cheaply-varnished wood like Grasshopper trying to snatch a pebble from his master's hand, but his wounded hand throbbed at the memory of his first encounter with the sleek, slick, malevolent sentience that had taken up residence in the weave and weft of Sam's hair, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. He was halfway to useless as it was, and while chicks might dig minor scars, they had no time for double amputees. Besides, he thought Stumpy would make a shitty nickname. So he kept his hands to himself, tucked them beneath his legs for good measure.

_Well, you better do something, boy,_ his personal Bobby Singer instructed helpfully. _Before that...whatever the hell it is gets bored with loose change and dried-out pens and reacquaints itself with you._

_Great idea, Bobby. But it's not like I'm Edward Scissorhands, here, and I don't think Sweeney Todd makes housecalls,_ he remonstrated inside his head as he recoiled from the thought of that perverse strand of hair slipping slyly over his bare skin and curling possessively around his chest until the skin split and blood sluiced and gushed down his belly in hot, sticky rivulets. He wondered if it would still feel warm and swollen as it slipped inside him like a parasitic hookworm, or if it would be the cold, gelatinous caress of a slug.

_Improvise, dammit._ Exasperation and a tinge of frustration.

_No problem. I'll just call the front desk and ask if they've got a weedeater handy. You know, in case a guest's hair gets out of control,_ he thought as he watched the grotesquely-elongated strand rise like a hooded cobra and loom over the sauce-smeared wad of napkin, an asp over the ruined body of a vole. He watched in frozen, breathless fascination, sure that the hair would lash out and swallow the napkin in a single, convulsive gulp, but it only hovered and swayed. There was a bizarre, contemplative attitude to its posture, as though it were considering its options, and though Dean knew it was absurd, that it was physically impossible, he thought that the hair could see.

_Quit your bellyaching, boy, and do something,_ Bobby ordered.

_Like what?_ He watched as the inky thread of living midnight bent to sniff the napkin, probed it with the delicate point of its usurped hair shaft, winnowed deftly into the cracks and crevices of the crumpled paper. It was unhurried yet purposeful, not a snake now, but a hunting dog casting for a scent. In and out, over and under, until the napkin was engulfed in swimming black threads. He saw fleeting flashes of white as the hair swarmed the hapless takeout napkin, and then the hairball squeezed.

_Not a snake or a dog,_ he thought numbly. _Nope. Oh, no. Like the blob folding itself over the body of a screaming dog._ He had no idea from whence that thought had come, but he knew it that it was right; it was, as they said, a home truth. It felt right in his bones, and so he let it lie.

_Stop digging in your brain lint and do something,_ Bobby thundered, and some distant part of him agreed that he should, but he could find within himself no urgency, only a torpid, disembodied interest, and he wondered if this was how Sammy felt every time he put together one of those cheap science kits and watched vinegar lava fizz and foam from the cone of a papier-mache volcano or sat cross-legged on the sweltering summer sidewalk and watched doomed ants sizzle and writhe beneath a a solar-powered death ray wielded by a pudgy-handed five-year-old god with a magnifying glass and more curiosity than empathy. Like a spectator to momentous events, a kid strapped into a rollercoaster and waiting for the world to drop out from under him and send him screaming into the abyss with his hands over his head and an idiot grin still plastered to his dying face. The hair's snuffling predations were hypnotic, and though he knew the hair could bode nothing but ill, he made no move to attract its attention, but lay still in the darkness and watched, heart thudding heavily against his ribs.

It soon bored of the napkin and released it from its oily grip, and though it was too dark to be certain, Dean thought he saw several hairline rents in the thin tissue. His fingers prickled and stung sympathetically from their cocoon of bandages, and he quashed the urge to shake the nettlesome tickle of medical-grade catgut from his restless nerve endings. He grit his teeth instead and concentrated on the hair's sly, intimate perusal of the nightstand's surface contents.

And then the hair darted out and snatched a quarter from among the change. It paused for a moment over the jumble of coins as though assessing their value, and then the tendril descended with frightening speed and coiled around the quarter. It was so sudden, startling, and inexplicable that he wasn't sure he'd seen it, and he blinked in astonishment. The hair rose with its prize gleaming dully from the dainty loop of hair that had ensnared it, and damned if the thing didn't look pleased, Gollum with his beloved Precious.

_It's like the supernatural equivalent of a St. Christopher's medal,_ he thought nonsensically. Either that, or it had a serious Coke jones. _Hope it can make do with Shasta._ The thought inspired the lunatic urge to laugh and he curled his injured hand into a fist to stifle the impulse.

The hair froze as though it had spotted the minute movement, and his amusement withered, replaced by a bitter-mouthed adrenaline that dried his tongue and tightened his chest. He willed himself to relax in preparation for rolling off the bed and dropping into an evasive crouch, and in his head, he heard his old man counting off in his familiar, gravelly cadence. _Ready? One...two..._

He never made it to three because the hair resumed its preening, triumphant sway, and then it retreated the way it had come, receding from the nightstand's cluttered landscape like the ebbing tide. Dean released a measured breath through his nose as it returned to the sagging, rumpled edge of Sam's bed and danced a queer, languid bolero over his sleeping brother's ear. It feinted and spiraled and performed a graceful pirouette, and then it dove behind the broad, fleshy shell of Sam's ear and tried to take the purloined quarter with it. The quarter was momentarily lost to the unruly thicket of Sam's hair, but then it slid out and tumbled to the pillow with a dull patter.

_Maybe Sammy's 'do has been hijacked by the spirit of some disgruntled, two-bit magic hack who wants to put on one last show_. He'd meant it as a joke, a bit of patented Winchester gallows humor, but spirit possession was as dangerous as it was rare, and his mind turned to grim recollections of the not-so-good Dr. Ellicot slipping into Sam's skin and spreading his disease behind his brother's eyes. Wearing Sam's skin was all the rage these days with the things that had no place on a just God's earth, and sometimes Dean wondered how it was that they could slip inside with so little resistance. A frightened, traitorous part of him wondered if Sammy invited them in, a lonely child in search of like-minded playmates. It was an awful, disloyal thought, but not as awful as the thought that the menagerie of the misbegotten slipped inside because it was empty.

_How sure are you that what you brought back was Sam?_ Azazel asked in the darkness, and if it weren't for the fact that he needed to keep an eye on Sam, he would have closed his eyes to shut him out.

So, he watched Sam, the faithful watcher in the night, and though the thud of his heart against his ribcage begged to differ, the watcher was utterly unsurprised when Sam abruptly sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed in one fluid motion, dragging the bedclothes to the floor and tangling them in his feet. 

"Sam?" Dean hissed, and tossed aside his own covers. He, too, swung his feet out of bed, and he sat on the sagging edge and stared at his brother. Even sitting, Sam loomed over him, hulking and silent and swaying slightly as the mattress settled with a groan. "Sam?"

Sam made no answer. He simply sat, shoulders slumped and big hands dangling between his knees and head bowed. Dean was tempted to reach out and shake him, but his injured hand throbbed and tingled with the memory of those sly, black hairs curling around his fingers and biting into his flesh, and so he snapped his fingers at Sam's drooping crown instead. "Sam, dammit," he barked. "Hey, Sammy, stop screwing around, goddammit, because I am all out of taking it easy."

But Sam wasn't screwing around, and Dean knew it. The air was too still and heavy, thick as caro syrup in his nostrils and medicinal and cloying on his tongue. It was the atmosphere of thunderstorms and bad dreams, oppressive and smothering and perversely gleeful, as if the universe couldn't wait to show him the next act in its great and secret show. It was the same air he'd felt in the Impala, when they'd been drifting through the airless hours after midnight and Sammy's sleep had been too deep to be natural. This was the air that came just before the monster leapt from the shadows and unzipped your guts, the moment just before the clock struck the hour of none. This was the air you tasted at the point of no return.

His uninjured hand rose of its own accord and drifted towards Sam, and Dean thought it was going to rest on his shoulder, but instead, it placed two fingers beneath Sam's chin and tilted it upward. It was a gesture he'd used often during their childhood, when Sammy had tried to hide cuts and bruises and loose teeth that made his gums sizzle and sing with the sting of imminent loss. _Lemme see, Sammy,_ he heard his childhood self say to a cowering, wet-faced six-year-old with a bloody mouth and a loosely-dangling tooth. _Lemme see. It'll just hurt for a second. One more little tug, I swear._

Except he didn't want to see. Not this time. He'd seen far too much as it was, and in Hell, he'd seen and seen and seen until his eyes had popped and sizzled and bubbled in their sockets. Once, Alistair had fused his eyelids to his eyebrows with a nonchalant scrape of his burning, black nails and bid him watch his entire flaying, vivisection, and evisceration, had made him watch as his skin had sloughed to the bloody floor and been met by his slopping entrails, had made him watch as he'd cooked a loop of his glistening entrails and eaten it with thoughtful relish. _Tastes like chorizo,_ he'd mused as he'd licked Dean from his bloody fingertips and the corners of his aristocratic mouth. _Let me guess: you're a salsa fan._

Alistair had also shown him that it was possible to see without eyes, just as he would later show him the beauty to be found in a knife's cutting blade, the sweet release of it. A great one for lessons, was Alistair. He and the old man had had that much in common.

_And sometimes you wonder if that's why you finally said 'yes',_ Alistair crooned inside his head. _Because you recognized home sweet home and dear old Dad, and all you ever wanted was to just go home. So many people have promised you that you could come home when the job was done, come home and settle down and do what you want for a change. But I'm the only one who ever delivered, and sometimes, you miss me._

_I don't want to see,_ Dean told himself as his fingers urged Sam's chin upward. _I've seen all I want to see and far too much that I didn't.. I don't want to raise my brother's chin and find Azazel gazing back at me, or the blank gaze of an idiot, vacant and shuttered and tastefully accented with a runner of spittle on his chin. I don't want to find a Sammy with dead, black eyes and a shit-eating smirk or the boy from the closet. And please, God, but I don't want to raise this familiar chin and discover Alistair waiting for me, malice in the curve of his stolen lips and disingenuous sympathy in his eyes._

He didn't want to see any of that, but his fingers never stopped raising Sam's chin, stopped tilting it upward to reveal Sam's face. The angel of the Lord who'd raised him from perdition could prate all he liked about the greater good and God's will and the great and holy cause, but for Dean, there had only ever been one cause, and that was Sam.

He braced himself, sure that the great and terrible truth would be revealed with his first glimpse of Sam's face, but when he saw it, there was only Sam. No yellow eyes or black ones, and no smug, leering mouth taunting him with half-truths and shameful secrets he'd thought well-buried. Sam's eyes were closed, as a matter of fact, closed and rolling dreamily behind his fluttering eyelids, fetuses squirming restively within their mothers' cocooning bellies. His expression was slack and serene, and his eyelashes, incongruously delicate against his broad, square-jawed face, trembled. Nothing dribbled from his mouth or wept from his eyes or dripped from his ears and nose. Nothing amiss. Just sleep, deep and restorative.

And yet...

There was a slyness to the stillness, the toothy, coiled anticipation of Sammy just before he jumped from behind a bedroom door and tackled Dean at the knees, four years old and blissfully unaware of how dangerous that could be. Sam's eyes were closed and fluttering to the rhythm of REM sleep, following the course of a dream Dean couldn't see, but the rest of him was wide awake and thrumming with restless energy.

_All operators are standing by,_ Dean thought grimly as Sam swayed on the edge of the bed, hulking and loose-jointed.

He wondered who would be on the end if he could tap into the line, who would be whispering into Sam's ear, and in his mind's eye, he saw a pale, long-fingered hand sweep hair from Sam's ear and pale, pink lips brush the sensitive flesh, taint it with a dirty little secret. The hand was Alistair's, cool and slender and perversely tender as it wrought its terrible work. The lips belonged to Ruby, or perhaps Lilith, puckered and full of poison. His stomach cramped and rolled, and he fought the urge to close his eyes and scuttle to the safety of his bed.

_Stay away from him,_ he warned the demons inside his head, and as they had done not so long ago, they smiled at his impotent fury and empty bluster. Lilith giggled behind her pearl-clawed hand, and Alistair sat back on his naked haunches and clucked disapprovingly at him.

_Whattaya gonna do, Deano?_ he crooned in his pinched, nasal voice, the voice that had made the most vicious, cold depravity sound so reasonable, so just in the cold light of Hell, with blood to the ankles and entrails bunched around his calves like wet lace. 

_Stay away from him,_ Dean reiterated uselessly, and Alistair smiled indulgently and waggled those elegant, skillful fingers at him.

"Fuck you," Dean growled to the dark room, where there was only he and Sam and the smell of a dead, dusty heater and yellow, unwashed skin. Sam said nothing, and the room went on stinking, and the bedside clock clicked and creaked on the beside table, and the yellow reek of dead skin sharpened to the acrid tang of something else altogether, something that wafted from Sam's pores like musk.

_Nope. No. Uh uh,_ Dean thought with hysterical stubbornness, and willed himself to smell anything else. "Sammy?" Too quiet, timid and brittle as candied sugar, but it was all he could manage with his heart and denial fighting for space in his throat.

Not a peep from Sam, not even a click or a snuffling snore.

_Not even a mouse,_ he thought stupidly. Then, _Wrong holiday_.

It was vapid and scattered, the fractured, grasping thought process of a panicked civilian getting an unwelcome eyeful of his first ghost, and the drill sergeant that bivouacked inside his head next door to Bobby roared at him to pull it together, soldier, before he got his goddamned nuts yanked off, and he wanted to; he'd been trained to obey that voice from the day his mother went from Cinderella to just plain cinders, but he couldn't stop looking at Sam. Sam who sat on the edge of the bed like a puppet whose master had yet to pick up the strings. Sam, who was waiting for Dean to turn his head.

_Just do it, boy,_ Bobby grunted, and tugged at the greasy bill of his cap. _Get it over with. It's like pullin' a tooth or settin' a broken bone. Soonest begun, soonest done._ Another brusque tug on the bill of his cap, and he spat on the dirty, oil-spattered gravel of the salvage yard.

It occurred to Dean as he squatted in front of his baby brother on an old man's creaking knees, knees older than the dirt that formed them, that maybe it had already begun. Maybe while he sat here gawking at Sam, the Thin Men had crept from beneath the bed to pool around his feet and coil around his ankles, boneless, fleshless fingers sliding up his legs and along his thighs like seams in his unraveling skin. Maybe while he sat here mooning, Tom Cullen mute and stupid in the face of a lunar eclipse above the unpeopled earth, Lilith had drifted from the closet, her small child's hand in Alistair's cool, fine-boned one.

He dropped his gaze to the floor, sure that he would see the Thin Men welling from the carpet or Lilith's shadow stretched over him like a caul, but the floor was clean and bare except for the humps of Sam's battered sneakers and the sloughed wad of his jeans puddled at the midpoint of the bed, and the only darkness had been the sane, ordinary darkness of night in a seedy motel. 

He let out a long, shuddering breath and raised his head to apply himself to the task of rousing Sam, and that was when it all went wrong. A shadow darker than the night just behind Sam's right ear, and then there was a sudden flare of whiskey-and-razor heat in his left cheek.

He fell back with an oath and scuttled backward until he struck the thick cotton buttress of his bed. The heat in his cheek deepened, and he brought his fingers to his face to perform a blind inspection of the wound. Thick, wet stippling beneath his probing fingers, and when he brought them to his lips, he tasted salt and copper and overcooked mustard greens, bitter and rank and puckering as alum.

"Fuck," he moaned, and grimaced and spat on the carpet. "Fuck, Sammy, what did you do?" he asked, reedy and disbelieving.

Sam didn't answer, but the strand of darkness that had scored his flesh had risen on the cold night air, light as spidersilk and dandelion spore. It hovered and bobbed, arched and sinuous as it regarded him. And yes, it was regarding him, assessing him as a cat assesses a dying mouse, cold and eager as it crouched in the shadows of a sagging front porch or in the dry, dancing grasses of a Kansas summer. Dean knew it as surely as he had once known that fleshless, clittering fingers could see without eyes. The thought disturbed him, stirred a memory of another Sam peering into a bodybag with the solemn reverence of a priest, his collar replaced by a stethoscope.

He also knew that like the fingers that had clittered and scrabbled and writhed like maggots turned to the sun, it would never stop. It would pursue him until he ran out of ground or the energy to run, would seek him out until it found his fragile human flesh and anchored there, sunk itself to the bone and squeezed until eternity pooled in his eyes like black water. It wouldn't stop until the Thin Men found him and trussed him and delivered him back to Hell with an oil drop bow.

He shifted hard left just as the strand darted again, and it skimmed the dingy white of the bedsheet. He lunged for the bedside lamp, hoping to blind his foe with a sudden burst of light, but the strand was faster, and it wrapped itself around his ear. He swore at the sudden scald of it and shook his head violently, a dog drying itself after an unwanted bath. His ear slipped free with an alarming crackle of overstretched cartilage, and the pain was a hot, pulsing throb, dental floss and salt on a flayed gum.

_Guess I had to restart my scar collection sometime,_ he thought as he scrabbled for the tiny light switch hidden beneath the lampshade. Blood oozed down his cheek and trickled onto his nape and pattered onto the cheap wood of the nightstand. His fingers, clumsy with adrenaline, found the small, hard nub and lost it again. "Goddammit! Sam! Wake the fuck up!"

Sam slept on, but the strand responded. It rose from the bed and darted towards Dean's face with liquid, lethal grace. Dean ducked, banging his chin on the nighstand and spilling loose change onto the floor, and it passed over his prickling scalp in a whickering, serpentine rush of air, humid and impossibly heavy _(like breath oh god it's breathing)_. It wrapped itself around the lamp, and Dean sensed triumph as it tightened its grip. He blinked, sure it wouldn't be able to lift its prize, but then the single strand swelled, priapic and rippling, muscles cramping beneath taut skin. In an instant, it was thicker than his bandage-swaddled wrist. It lifted the lamp and held it aloft for a moment and then it hurled it against the far wall, where it struck a bleary watercolor of a tree-lined street in autumnal splendor and shattered in a shower of sparks and filament and gritty ceramic.

He thought of the Gideon Bible that gathered dust and condom wrappers in hotels across America, red and worn though few hands had ever touched it, the last reading material of lost and discarded souls with nowhere to go but out, but the strand was already turning back on itself in preparation for another assault, and so Dean let it go. If it hadn't stopped Daddy's girls from selling themselves to pimps and long-haul truckers for cigarettes and blow and the chance for a warm body and a warmer bed, or stopped hard-luck husbands from sucking on the end of a .38 special and tasting cold iron and peppery cordite just before their fingers twitched and their brains smeared the walls, then it wouldn't stop this. It was flimsy cardboard and flimsier paper and so many empty, useless words. Because God wasn't good, and He certainly wasn't great, and He absolutely wasn't in this grotty little bolthole in Tarrytown, New York.

So Dean turned away from God and toward the bathroom, where the pocketknife his father had given him rested, not in the sink now, but beside it, closed and carefully dried. It wasn't much, just worn wood and stainless steel, but it was more than the Almighty had ever given him, more than ink and absence and a heavenly chaperone who couldn't be assed to wipe away forty years of memories unfairly rendered as he'd so easily expunged thirty years of scars honestly won.

He dropped to his hands and knees and scrambled towards the gap between the beds. Shards of shattered lamp shifted beneath him and bit into the untested skin of his palms and knees, nipping and scraping like eager teeth. He considered seizing a large shard and swinging it at the strand, but the ceramic was brittle and crumbling to grit as he moved, and he doubted it had the strength to wound the pursuing strand, let alone sever it. He would have one chance to save himself. If he swung and missed, that awful, alien tendril would find his wrist or his ankle or worse yet, his throat, and dispatch him as neatly as it had destroyed the lamp. There would be nothing left of Dean 2.0 except a fine mist of blood stippled over the room and a pair of tattered, bloody boxers and some socks on the floor. So he tucked his chin to his chest and rounded his shoulders to protect his neck and crawled blindly toward the end of the beds and the right turn that led to the bathroom.

Another whickering hiss, and he flattened just as the strand passed overhead and crashed into the bleary autumn watercolor, which exploded into a pulp of shredded canvas and clattered to the dresser. It teetered on one ruined edge for a surreal, delirious moment and then fell to the floor with a graceless thud.

_Let the wild rumpus start,_ he thought madly as he army-crawled around the bend, elbows digging into the rough, dirty nap of the carpet.

The strand was turning, preparing for another strike. He scrabbled back to his hand and knees and bounded forward, a springbok fleeing the snapping jaws of a crocodile. The bathroom was close now, so close that he could see the muddled outline of the sink through the open door. He pushed off with his toes and leapt for the door the door and the inviting patch of vinyl floor.

Gummy tackiness under his fingers, and then he was yanked ruthlessly backward. He yelped in surprise and threw out his hands in search of purchase. His fingers caught the doorjamb on either side, and he held on as tightly as he could, grainy wood and flaking stucco on his skin. His injured hand howled in protest, but he could not afford mercy, and so he had gritted his teeth and held fast, muscles locked and shoulders straining against the persistent tug that threatened to reel him into the fatal embrace that waited behind him.

He dimly wondered what it would be like to be devoured by his brother's hair. Would it be quick, the peristaltic crush, or would he be transported anew to the deathless hour of none and linger interminably while the flesh sloughed from his softening bones and his lidless eyes watched his blood dye the pool of acid in which he stewed a deep, luxurious red, crushed velvet and rose petals while the pool bubbled with his dying breaths? Would it hurt, or would it be the painless, languorous death he'd glimpsed in the library, death by drowning in a vat of warm gelatin? It would be a fitting end either way, the logical conclusion to a life subsumed by everything Sam.

"Sam!" he bellowed. "I need a little backup here." His arms strained and trembled as he clung tenaciously to the doorframe, and the stucco beneath his bloodless, throbbing fingers crumbled and sifted to the floor in a fine layer of dust.

No answer from Sam. No furtive rustle of bedclothes or the heavy thud of Sam's socked feet on the worn carpet. Dean grunted in frustration and pulled against the tugging strand, but it only tightened its already-crushing grip on his rapidly-numbing ankle. Sweat mingled with the blood on his face and seeped into the cut that had spawned it, and Dean hissed at the oddly-sensual burn of it, so like the burn of a good whiskey in his belly on a Friday night with sawdust on the floor and the lazy, warm-molasses heat of a good night's work in his muscles and some Johnny Cash on the lopsided Wurlitzer, slurry and exhausted and truer than the fake mahogany of the bar.

_Are you sure that's really what it's like, Dean?_ Alistair crooned inside his head, and the bead of sweat at his temple became the dirty, blood-spattered tip of his claw against Dean's taut, crawling flesh. _Are you sure it's not like the sultry lap of Hell's flames at your naked back as you worked at my table? You were reluctant at first--your father's blood, I suppose; there are some taints that never wash out no matter how high or hot the flames burn--but once you got the order of things through your thick head, you were an apt pupil, the best I've had in millennia. A quick study, and so eager to please, a regular little beaver. You liked it there in your little room with no interruptions and a clearly-defined purpose. It was cozy. Home sweet home. And oh, how you miss it._

He would have told Alistair to shove it if he had the breath for it, but there was none to spare. Instead, he focused his flagging energy on getting a glimpse of Sammy, the silent shadow at his back. He took a deep breath and twisted his torso in order to see what lay behind him, but the angle was skewed and offered only a view of the far edge of Sam's bed, drab and unruffled. He tried to twist further, but that would have meant loosening his fading hold on the flimsy doorjamb. He grimaced and huffed and turned his neck until the tendons creaked and his vertebrae gave an ominous pop, but the view remained the same. So he let his head hang and peered beneath his armpit.

Sam appeared from ass to neck, a hulking shadow on the edge of the bed. Slumped and unmoving, rounded shoulders and bowed spine and dangling arms, but no awareness, no tension or flurry of motion, no Sammy racing to the rescue.

No Sammy whatsoever.

_Are you sure it's Sam you brought back?_ Azazel with his yellow eyes and terrible purloined cornpone grin.

_The Thin Men gobbled him up_ the boy from the closet whispered dolefully, and gazed at him with his solemn, dead-water eyes, loose-jointed and arachnid as he squatted on his fishbelly haunches in a closet that smelled of dust and mothballs and brimstone.

He considered letting go then, letting the strand reel him in like a hooked trout. He was tired of being wrong after all, of being the soldier boy and the dupe and the dray horse ridden until it was left, swaybacked and neighing feebly, to die in a field. He could simply let his hands fall away, stripped nails pulled from rotten wood, and let the darkness reclaim him. It didn't matter if it hurt or if the end was a long time coming, because the end was just a prelude to forever, a final breath before the drowning started and never stopped. When he woke on the other side of that greatest of divides, he would likely find himself in Hell again, but that was all right. That would be better than this queer, hallucinatory half-life where nothing looked or felt as it ought and everything tasted of ash and burning fat. Hell was awful, but it was familiar by now, and the only place that had ever willingly taken him in( _home sweet home dean home sweet home_ ). Demons lied, but their torture held no falsehood.

What stopped him was Sam, or rather, the memory of him, wide-eyed and sticky with blood as Dean had died on the bedroom floor of a suburban tract house, blood pooling on the fabric of Sam's jeans and the tasteful beige carpet. Sam's face an open wound infected with grief and the realization of his abject failure. He thought of Sam's hands cradling him as the cold set in, their roles reversed at the last while Bobby stood dumbly by with his useless shotgun. Sam's voice, strangled and pubescent and clogged with snot and disbelieving grief, pleading with him not to slip down the rabbit hole and into the lap of of tiny queen in a white frock smeared to red and coated in soot.

He couldn't leave Sammy like that again, lost and floundering and clutching dead weight and empty air. He might have temporarily vacated the premises, left it for the amusement of something that tickled his nostrils with a piquant truth he refused to recognize, but Sam would come back, would return with a jolt that banished sleep and brought him to bewildered, blinking wakefulness. He would yawn and rub the sleep from his eyes, and then he would see, and whatever he saw here, he would never unsee. It would be stamped behind his eyes, bracketed by the images of Jess burning on the ceiling and Dean breathing his last in a bloody froth. He would carry it forever, and it would scrape him raw with every step, and if it went on long enough, then maybe Sammy would slip his skin and never come back, leave it for the crows and the Thin Men and the habitation of wandering demons.

Once, he had died to save Sam from a kinder fate, and now he would live to save him from this one. He jerked his bound ankle as hard as he could, and though the tension around it eased not at all, the strand went suddenly slack. Dean was tempted to take a peek through the armpit window again, but the grunt at the base of his brain knew it would be his last mistake, and so he let go of the door jamb and pushed off with his free foot, hands outstretched, reaching for the sink. 

For a moment, he though he was short and as good as dead, and then his fingers smashed painfully against the Formica counter. He scrabbled until they found the cool lip of the sink, and then he heaved himself upright, spine crackling and wounded fingers singing an aria of protest as stitches gave way with a wet trickle. He balanced on one leg like a drunken egret, heart triphammering inside a chest bruised and sprung and knotted beneath clammy skin, and before the strand could gather itself, he snatched the pocketknife from its resting place.

Just in time, as it turned out, because the strand suddenly yanked his foot out from under him and began to drag him backward with terrifying speed. His captured ankle exploded with a bright flare of pain, and wet, sticky warmth had flooded his skin and soaked his sock.

_Great, this thing just cut off my foot,_ he thought dismally. Then, more coldly still, _If it severed an artery, I'm dead._

_You're gonna be dead soon either way if you don't get a move on, boy,_ Bobby grunted prosaically as Dean fumbled with the pocketknife with bruised, bloody, ineffectual fingers. 

The blade nipped his fingers and drew blood as he flipped it open; like its long-dead giver, it demanded sacrifice before succor was given, and Dean felt a grudging wave of admiration for it and a fierce pang for the father he had lost. He tightened his grip on the handle and focused on the drop of blood that beaded on the tip with a perverse beauty, counted to three, and snapped around to plunge the blade into the writhing stand.

And he whiffed it. A stunned bark of laughter escaped him. "Well, all right then," he drawled, and then he reached out and seized the strand with his injured hand. It was the breadth of a coil of hemp, a live wire in his bleeding hand, turgid and thrumming with a malicious intent that made his head swim and his stomach churn. It bucked in his blood-slick grip, and the tattered bandages sloughed and bunched like degloved skin. If it managed to loop around his fingers and squeeze, they would drop off like snipped cigar ends.

"Fuck you," he snarled, and scored it with the tip of his blade.

There was no dramatic scream, no wild death throes, no thunderclap as the strand dissolved to white ash and smoldered serenely on the tatty carpet. It was simply gone, the only proofs of its existence in the ruins of the room and the cuts and bruises he wore and the harsh, rotten stink that burned his nostrils and made his eyes water and stirred his unsettled guts with its dreadful familiarity.

_My girl, my girl, where did you go? Tell me, where did you sleep last night?_ a tinny voice moaned inside his head, and he swallowed thickly and stared at the ceiling until it stopped slaloming like a pendulum.

"Dean?" A groggy rasp, but it made him giddy with relief. Sam, awake at last. "Jesus Christ! Dean!" A flurry of bedclothes aplenty then, and urgent footfalls, and then Sam's enormous knees appeared on the periphery of his vision, twin slabs of basalt thrust out of the mossy earth. "Oh, God, Dean, what did you _do_? Sammy moaned in despair, and his fingers floated over his forehead and down the cut on his face and drifted over his chest, cataloguing the extent of visible injuries and looking for hidden ones.

"Saved our asses is what," Dean declared with fuzzy vehemence. "And it wasn't me. It was your hair."

"Dean..." Pitying and on the verge of tears, and anger flooded Dean's mouth, bitter and caustic as ammonia.

"Don't you 'Dean' me, Sammy. Just don't." He rolled onto his side and propped himself on one elbow. "I'm not crazy, and I'm not making this up. Christ, Sam, look around. Do you really think I did all this myself while you were picking the candyfruits from the gumdrop trees in Care Bear Land?"

Sam's gaze settled on the knife beneath Dean's bloody palm, and Dean could see the Stanford-greased wheels turning in his head, could see them merrily churning out images of Dean slipping out of bed and redecorating the room in budget loon. He could see Sam's lips pursing, plump with soothing noises and the useless platitudes he sprinkled over the heads of shellshocked widows and poor bastards too slow to outrun the monster.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Sammy, this place is trashed. Use your obnoxiously-gigantic head. Do you really think I could have gone all _Roadhouse_ on it and not woken you up?"

Sam sat back on his heels and scanned his surroundings--the shattered lamp and the obliterated painting and the warped bathroom doorframe. He lingered on that last, and on the bloody handprints there and smeared on the sink and down the cabinet beneath. His jaw worked and his fingers plucked nervously at his leg hair.

"What happened here?" Sam asked, and Dean heard the faint stirrings of belief, but he knew he wasn't convinced, not yet. He needed a final nudge, a chance to press his doubting finger into the ragged edge of irrefutable proof.

"Check the camera," Dean said, and fought the urge to collapse into a sprawl again.

Sam's brow furrowed. "What camera?"

"The one I put in the bedside table."

"You were spying on me?" Incredulous and indignant, and Dean would have laughed if he weren't so tired.

"No, Sam, I wasn't spying on you," Dean retorted. "I was getting proof since you weren't exactly willing to take my word for it. I figured if you wouldn't believe me, then you might believe your own eyes. You know, empirical evidence. You Stanford types get all hot and bothered for that kind of stuff, right? It's like a nerd aphrodisiac."

"Shut up, Dean," Sam said, but there was no heat in it. It was listless and impossibly tired.

"Just check it," Dean ordered, and let himself sink to the carpet once more. He was sore and battered, raw from where the strand had dragged him across the carpet and woozy from blood loss and the ebb of adrenaline.

Sam made no move to comply, and Dean knew that if he didn't, the game was lost, because he was too spent to force his hand. He doubted he could so much as prop himself against the end of the bed at the moment. So he lay on the floor with his hand cradled to his chest and concentrated on the act of breathing, on the steady expansion of his lungs behind his smarting ribcage. It was slow and steady and soporific, and his muscles uncoiled a little more with every breath. He'd forgotten how comforting the sound of breathing could be when lungs weren't flooded with blood and bile or choked with the dirt of a makeshift grave.

"Please, Sam." The last weapon in his arsenal, cheapest but surest.

Finally, Sam went, knees popping as he rose. Dean heard the scrape and shuffle of Sam's feet as he padded to the nightstand. The creak and clatter as Sam fiddled with the clock's casing. The snap of cracking plastic as Sam pulled off its face and retrieved the tiny camera and its accompanying memory card. 

Dean followed the progress of Sam's feet as he crossed the room to the cheap three-legged table on which his laptop rested. Sam opened the laptop, tapped the mousepad, and inserted the memory card into one of the open card slots. Another series of taps, and then he peered at the screen.

"Fast-forward to the last ten minutes," Dean suggested. "That should be all of it. If it's not, it will be enough."

He closed his eyes and covered them with his arm, and he waited. He wondered what he would do if the camera had malfunctioned, or if it simply showed him fighting shadows in an empty hotel room, fighting monsters only he could see. He found a perverse relief in the possibility. If he were wrong about sentient hair, then maybe he was wrong about angels and the holy tax accountant that claimed to have raised him from perdition. Maybe he was a figment of his broken imagination, a desperate attempt by his mind to bring equilibrium to the spiraling insanity of Hell, or maybe he was just some nutcase who recognized his own peculiar stripe of lunacy in Dean's eyes.

"Dean, I don't-," Sam said, and Dean allowed himself the sweetness of hope.

And then Sam simply stopped.

They left without finding the horseman. It took them longer than it should have done to pack up and leave the citizens of Tarrytown to their fates. They moved slowly and carefully, men of blown glass who shuffled and tottered beneath the weight of stones in their bellies and burdens on their backs. They did not speak, lips pressed into thin, white lines as they stuffed clothes into duffel bags and stowed guns and rock salt in the Impala's trunk. Sam was pale as he moved from bathroom to bedroom to small expanse of asphalt in front of the room, and he stole furtive glances at Dean as they passed in the doorway, gauging his anger as he had done so often when they were kids and Sam had spit in the Devil's eye one time too many. _Are you mad, Dean? You mad?_ his expression said, though his mouth moved not at all.

There was guilt, too, on Sam's face, an anguished flicker in his eyes that not even his overgrown bangs could conceal. Dean told himself that it was for the job left undone and for the unfortunate townsfolk who would never see morning, and maybe some of it was; the only thing bigger than Sam's Sasquatch frame was his heart, but there was a sly, sullen wariness to it that raised Dean's hackles and brought to mind a dog that had snatched a porterhouse from the picnic table when no one was looking. He thought of that smell he refused to name and the four months that Sam had been left without a keeper.

_My girl, my girl, where did you go? Tell me, where did you sleep last night?_ echoed in his mind, and he shivered.

"You want me to drive?" Sam offered as Dean slammed the trunk.

"No, I got it."

"Your hand's pretty messed up."

"I said I got it."

Sam studied him, flat-eyed and silent. "Fine." He turned and stalked to the passenger side. He got inside and slammed the door.

_Tough titty, said the kitty,_ thought Dean, and he hobbled to his own door, careful not to put too much weight on his ankle, which had begun to swell. In truth, he wasn't sure he had anything, but he was damned if he'd let Sam drive. He might decide that Dean was crazy after all and drive somewhere other than Bobby's cluttered old salvage yard with its books and trinkets and talismans and lingering sense of home and safety. Yes, his hand was a wreck, but the Impala would take him in as she had always done, and it was nothing that couldn't be fixed with soap, water, and a little TLC.

So Dean drove, and the blood seeped into the wheel and dripped onto his pants. He tried to leave behind the boy from the closet and the Thin Men and the mother with the grinning, ruined face that bid him take what was his, but it was no use. He was a detail man. He caught glimpses of them every time he chanced a glance in the rearview mirror, hunkered in the backseat or stretched too thinly on the blacktop or curling fleshless, black fingers over the headrest. 

_They're yours, Dean,_ his mother said inside his head, implacably patient. _And what you own always comes home._

He was tempted to close his eyes, but the road ahead wound and curved like a dry riverbed. The Impala sped through the night, black and sleek and clean, and the rumble of her engine was the forged-iron thunder of hooves.


End file.
